Answer:
Our Ten Contributions to Civilization
A native of Ohio and a graduate of Ohio State, ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER was appointed to his professorship at Harvard in 1924. As a teacher and author he is internationally respected for his knowledge of American history, and in the paper that follows he reminds us that over the years this nation has made its weight felt more by ideas than by wealth.
ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER, SR.
MARCH 1959 ISSUE
SINCE the United States has now become the leader of the free world, our allies are asking, and we ourselves should be asking, what this portends for the future of civilization. The key to the answer, I suggest, lies in what I venture to call America's seminal contributions of the past. In my view there have been at least ten.
THE RIGHT OF REVOLUTION
First and foremost stands the concept of the inherent and universal right of revolution proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence: the doctrine that "all men are created equal" possessing "unalienable rights" to "life, liberty, and the Pursuit of happiness," with the corollary that governments derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed" and that therefore the people have the right to supplant a government "destructive of these ends" with one which they believe "most likely to effect their safety and happiness. True, the history of England provided precedents for the men of 1776, and the Age of Enlightenment supplied intellectual support; but the flaming pronouncement, followed by its vindication on the battlefield, made the doctrine ever afterward an irrepressible agency in "the course of human events."
