EV, as you point out, the phrase was so accurate that we spilled the blood of 600,000 Americans validating it. The principle proved more enduring than the hypocrisy but the price was a war that reverberates to this day.
And Rb, as you point out, the Founders had to make a great moral compromise in order to ensure that the Constitution passed, which was to place that principle on hold. It didn't stay so, it was too powerful for that.
Best to you both.
Best to you to, Bill. Thanks for your very astute input.
One more comment: I’ve generally found that those who are the most critical of the founding generation’s shortcomings in this area are themselves hypocritically doing something far worse: they are empowering the killing of 3 - 4000 American babies every day through abortion.
Rb ver. 2.0, I have no idea whether this is true in your case. I don’t know you.
he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.
As usual, you demonstrate your consummate wisdom. And I mean that with a capital “C”.