Those who believe in the practicability of establishing socialistic Utopias and still preserving liberty base their belief on a false assumption of the nature of man. They believe men are inherently good and can be trusted with absolute power over the lives, the property and the liberty of their fellows. They believe that we can create absolute power without having it absolutely corrupted. Nothing in the history of mankind supports this idealistic view. Every government that has been given absolute power has established tyrannical absolutism and destroyed individual liberty.

Our Founding Fathers knew their history. They had lived under the heel of corrupted power. They distrusted government by men, instead of by law. That is why they strove to set up a government of divided and limited powers. That is why Thomas Jefferson, who more than most of his associates trusted in the goodness of the people, spoke the overwhelming view of all the leaders of his time when he said, “In questions of power let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down by the chains of the Constitution.”

Today the Eisenhower administration is attempting to return to the people and the states some of the rights and responsibilities taken from them by the two “Deals.” The Manion Commission has been set up to study ways and means of doing this. [Manion Commission on Intergovernmental Relations] Much good can be expected from it.

But the only way our people can be certain of retaining their freedom, of preserving the independence of the states, of stopping and rolling back the drive toward political, economic and social centralization in America is to act themselves at home.

Only if our people keep fighting against Federal aid programs, keep fighting onerous Federal restrictions, keep voting for those who promise more power to the states and less to Washington, can liberty be preserved. As President Eisenhower put it recently, “How can we better fit ourselves to be worthy of freedom, to guard its virtues, to enjoy its bounty? . . . Only if each citizen in every community matches the founders of this nation in fiery independence, confident optimism, sturdy self reliance, and that appetite and capacity for difficulties which have always been such plain marks of America.” [Oct. 6, 1953 address]