Forward To Freedom - The American Constitution and Humanity's Struggle for Liberty Across the Ages is a fast-paced, informative, and inspiring account of the Constitution and its historical roots. It should be a must-read for all citizens of the United States, those aspiring to become its citizens, and others seeking to understand "government by the people."
The daily news is filled with references to separation of powers, checks and balances, federalism, judicial review, and other constitutional principles. All these require comprehension of the Constitution if "we the people" are to hold our leaders accountable to rule within constitutional bounds. Forward To Freedom provides us such comprehension.
The Framers of the Constitution deeply believed that the hand of Divine Providence is at work in history. They well knew the exciting story of humanity's struggle for liberty across the ages and viewed the Constitution as a culminating moment in that struggle and one in which God played a role.
As the Framers knew, six thousand or more years ago the earliest civilizations of the Middle East crushed freedom in the name of divine right of one man to rule. Ancient Israel, which experienced several hundred years of republican government, proved the only exception. Freedom made some progress in Classical Greece and Rome, and the Framers learned from the Greek and Roman political philosophers. But Greece's efforts to build a stable democracy and Rome's attempt to remain a republic both ultimately failed.
The Framers thoroughly understood how limited government slowly developed in England during centuries of effort to limit kings. Final victory for freedom came with the Glorious Revolution of 1688 when consent of the governed henceforth became the basis of English government. At that time, English philosopher John Locke articulated fundamentally new principles of politics that rapidly became widely accepted in England and Colonial America. When England tried to greatly increase control over the American colonies than before, the result was the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence, which reflected many of John Locke's ideas.
The ideals proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence-liberty, equality, unalienable rights, and consent of the governed-remained only empty ideals until the Constitution institutionalized them in a functioning government. The Constitution is indeed the product of compromises reached at the Convention, but it also reflects agreement on fundamental principles of enormous importance. The Constitutional Convention produced a document that remains the oldest of any nation, and that became a model for the world and object of veneration by Americans. More than any other single factor, the Constitution accounts for the fact that the United States became the most prosperous and powerful nation in history.
