Breathe deeply..................

     On July 5, 1926, President Calvin Coolidge, who was born of the Fourth of July, 1872, spoke in Philadelphia to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.  Coolidge was more learned than his cultured despisers know and more learned than most of them are.  He translated Dante's Inferno as a wedding gift for his wife, he read Cicero in Latin, and there is no extant evidence that he ever said "the business of America is business."  That day in Philadelphia he spoke "to reaffirm and reestablish those old theories and principles which time and the unerring logic of events have demonstrated to be sound."  The founding of the United States, he said, represented a "new civilization...a new spirit...more developed in its regard for the rights of the individual" than any in Europe.  Coolidge said "life in a new and open country" had given rise to "aspirations which could not be realized in any subordinate position."  These aspirations. "decreed by the very laws of human nature," testified to the fact that "man everywhere has an unconquerable desire to be the master of his own destiny."  The Declaration's "great truths were in the air" Americans breathed.

-George F. Will,  The Conservative Sensibility