Notable Quotable: Lincoln On Loving Liberty

This notable quote comes from a letter Abraham Lincoln wrote to his friend, Joshua F. Speed, on Aug. 14 1855

“Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except Negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except Negroes and foreigners, and Catholics’. When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”

This quote gives us a social benchmark against which to measure the social progress Americans have made over the last 170 years when Lincoln’s letter to his friend was penned. Have we formed our nation into a more perfect union during this long time span?

We might ask ourselves, are we more at peace in the world or with each other?

With all the advances of modern society, are we any more capable of seeing each other in God’s image, or are certain populations still deemed pariahs and undeserving of inalienable rights or equality under the law?

As the new administration pushes those with decades of service and experience out of their high-ranking military positions because of their race, will we be safer in the inexperienced hands of good-old white boys who take their place?

As the FAA is gutted and safety regulations eliminated, will our skies be safer?

When seniors are denied social security due to the heartless presumption they are nothing more than a burden to society, will you look the other way and believe it puts more money in your pocket? Is this how we work toward a more perfect union?

When consumer protections no longer exist and corporate accountability becomes a relic of the past, leaving Americans without any right to arbitrate or litigate a settlement, will we all be better off or are we making rapid “progress in degeneracy?”

As Artificial Intelligence quickly replaces the workforce, will we applaud the progress as necessary and efficient despite a calculated explosion in homelessness and home invasions? Is this what we call making America great again?

When human trafficking becomes a pay-to-play privilege, when passports become golden and sold to the highest bidders, when your personal information is scraped from social media and sold for profit, and when banks decide you don’t deserve to have a bank account or, worse, call in your home loan, will this make your life easier?

Things were not close to perfect 170 years ago. But are we any closer to our goal of a more perfect union when the news media now serves the needs and wants of billionaires and the political candidates they back? This is our own generation’s pretense of loving liberty—though we enable our cherished freedoms, long fought for, to be rescinded one by one.  

Russia’s despotism, Lincoln might remind us, can be taken pure and without the base alloy of hypocrisy, but in America where most of us still love liberty, we are able to clearly see the invading despotism and call out the accompanying hypocrisy. The question before us is, will we? The answer can only come from each one of us in the depth of our own heart.

Image: Political cartoon from 1903