Recently I picked up a book of Great American Speeches and found, to my disappointment, that the speeches of the nation’s founders were followed by a long sequence of unreadable overwrought slop. But finally I did come to a speech of timeless eloquence, and powerful rhetoric. “The most unquestionable right,” I read there,

may be rendered doubtful, if once admitted to be a subject of controversy.

Now I believe, I am true believer, in the importance of open debate. But there is something right in this assertion. It may be best appreciated on a small scale. Some commitments are easier to keep, maybe they can only be kept, if the question of whether to keep them has been banished from one’s mind. I used to run marathons. In training I would run 50 miles a week, sometimes more. (Serious runners will regard this number as pathetic. They can go to hell.) People sometimes asked me how I managed to do it, day after day. I knew the answer: because I never asked myself “should I go running today?” The question was closed; deliberation was not an option. Marathon training would be impossible, for me, if it required daily affirmations of my willingness to continue the project. I made it to the starting line, because running became what I did, not something I continually decided to do. Not to wade into difficult territory, but I believe this about marriage as well. One good way to stay married, is to arrange your mental life so that the question of whether to stay married does not enter into it, even when times get hard. To return to the speech, it may be, as well, that our fundamental rights are best secured, if we as a people regard them as “unquestionable.” Just to open discussion of whether we should have this or that liberty, can be a dangerous step towards its erosion.

The speech also warns against division and polarization. Reasoned disagreement can turn sour. If the topic is central to one’s identity, or way or life, views can become entrenched, and the reasons lost, as each side passes on its opposition but, necessarily, not its arguments, to its children:

Already [the other side] has taken possession of the pulpit, of the schools, and to a considerable extent of the press; those great instruments by which the mind of the rising generation will be formed. [The present generation] will be succeeded by those who have been taught to hate the people and institutions [I hold dear]. ... It is easy to see the end. By the necessary course of events, if left to themselves, we must become, finally, two people.

Finally, the speech warns against government overreach. The idea, “that this Government had a right in the last resort to determine the extent of its own powers,” was a right some Senators at the time wanted it to claim. But this doctrine is “tantamount to the assumption of unlimited power on the part of the Government.” That is bad in itself. But just as concerning is its potential effect on “the public mind.” If some portion of the people thinks something a sin, they of course

believe it to be an obligation of conscience to abolish it, if they should feel themselves in any degree responsible for its continuance.

But if the government can stamp out any sin, then each person is “in a degree responsible for [that sin’s] continuance,” since they could vote or otherwise agitate for the government to stop it. The end will be people fighting, tooth and claw, to put their hands on the levers of power, so that they may impose on others, through force, their particular conception of virtue and vice. Liberalism requires limits on the government’s power, even its power to do right.

The speech concludes, rousingly, that one must take a stand; that wavering compromise risks extinction:

If we do not defend ourselves none will defend us; if we yield we will be more and more pressed as we recede; and if we submit we will be trampled under foot.

Winston Churchill said that, in wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies. Of course the reverse is also a devastating possibility: a body of lies carefully shielded by powerful truths. And it is dismaying to see this possibility realized, in the first great speech after Jefferson’s Inaugural, in the Library of America’s Great Speeches: a speech by John C. Calhoun, defending slavery.

American Independence in Verse, now available for purchase.