The Correspondence of Thomas Jefferson
By Subject
CONSTITUTION / UNITED STATES / AMENDING
Our revolution commenced on more favorable ground. It presented us an
album on which we were free to write what we pleased. We had no
occasion to search into musty records, to hunt up royal parchments, or
to investigate the laws and institutions of a semi-barbarous ancestry.
We appealed to those of nature, and found them engraved on our hearts
.
We have not yet so far perfected our constitutions as to venture to
make them unchangeable. But still, in their present state, we consider
them not otherwise changeable than by the authority of the people, on
a special election of representatives for that purpose expressly: they
are until then the
lex legum.
But can they be made unchangeable? Can one generation bind another,
and all others, in succession forever? I think not. The Creator has
made the earth for the living, not the dead. Rights and powers can
only belong to persons, not to things, not to mere matter, unendowed
with will. The dead are not even things. The particles of matter which
composed their bodies, make part now of the bodies of other animals,
vegetables, or minerals, of a thousand forms. To what then are
attached the rights and powers they held while in the form of men? A
generation may bind itself as long as its majority continues in life;
when that has disappeared, another majority is in place, holds all the
rights and powers their predecessors once held, and may change their
laws and institutions to suit themselves. Nothing then is unchangeable
but the inherent and unalienable rights of man.
John Cartwright, 5 June 1824
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