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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - I. The Approach - 1. American Ideals and the American Conscience - 5. The Roots in Christianity - 6. The Roots in English Law - 7. American Conservatism
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12 An American Dilemma
ualism,” nor a relatively continuous prosperity, that made it possible for
America to get along without a publicly organized welfare policy almost
up to the Great Depression in the ^thirties but it was also the world^s most
generous private charity.
6. The Roots in English Law
The third main ideological influence behind the American Creed is
English law. The indebtedness of American civilization to the culture of
the mother country is nowhere else as great as in respect to the democratic
concept of law and order, which it inherited almost without noticing it.
It is the glory of England that, after many generations of hard struggle,
it established the principles of justice, equity, and equality before the law
even in an age when the rest of Europe (except for the cultural islands
of Switzerland, Iceland, and Scandinavia) based personal security on the
arbitrary police and on lettres de cachet.
This concept of a government ^‘of laws and not of men” contained
certain fundamentals of both equality and liberty. It will be a part of our
task to study how these elemental demands are not nearly realized
even in present-day America. But in the American Creed they have never
been questioned. And it is no exaggeration to state that the philosophical
ideas of human equality and the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and
property, hastily sowed on American ground in a period of revolution
when they were opportune—even allowing ever so much credit to the
influences from the free life on the Western frontier—^would not have
struck root as they did if the soil had not already been cultivated by
English law.
Law and order represent such a crucial element both in the American
Creed and in the spotty American reality that, at a later stage of our
argument in this chapter, we shall have to devote some further remarks
to this particular set of ideological roots.
7. American Conservatism
These ideological forces—the Christian religion and the English law
also explain why America through all its adventures has so doggedly stuck
to its high ideals: why it has been so conservative in keeping to liberalism
as a national creed even if not as its actual way of life. This conservatism,
in fundamental principles, has, to a great extent, been perverted into a
nearly fetishistic cult of the Constitution. This is unfortunate since the
150-year-old Constitution is in many respects impractical and ill-suited for
modern conditions and since, furthermore, the drafters of the document
made it technically difficult to change even if there were no popular feeling
against change.
The worship of the Constitution also is a most flagrant violation of the
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