The New Road to Serfdom Read Free Page B

incorporated into the growing republic when their homes were annexed from Mexico. Some were carried to the New World in bondage. Some had inhabited the continent for many thousands of years, and were never asked whether they wanted to be Americans.
    There was, in other words, a gap between theory and practice. Not everyone who lived within the territory of the United States had the same opportunities. While successive governments did in time try to offer everyone the full dignities implied by U.S. citizenship, they sometimes failed. Then again, occasional failure is part of the human condition. To say that the American dream has not always been realized is no more than to say that perfection is not of this world.
    This point is worth stressing, because critics of the United States, domestic and foreign, are never happier than when alleging double standards. It is sometimes argued, for example, that the achievements of the American republic are devalued by the fact that it haddisplaced an aboriginal culture. But how can we possibly quantify human happiness? Who can judge whether a Native American today, with access to education, medicine, and the full range of modern recreational technology, is better off than he would have been had Europeans never arrived in North America? Or whether, if his quality of life is indeed superior, that superiority justifies the terrible price paid by those of his kin who died as the result of unfamiliar pathogens or lost hunting grounds? And who can say what cost to the indigenous peoples is redeemed by America’s contributions to human happiness, from the invention of the airplane to the defeat of Nazism?
    I don’t see how we can comfortably answer any of these questions. What we
can
say with some certainty is this: Having at times behaved very shabbily toward the earlier inhabitants of the continent, the U.S. authorities eventually tried to do the right thing, giving Native Americans a choice between assimilation and autonomy. This record compares favorably enough with other countries where settlers have supplanted less technologically advanced peoples. But, even if it didn’t, it would in no sense cheapen either the motives or the achievements of those Americans who sought over the centuries, and with surprising success, to actualize the dream of a free, egalitarian, and open polity.
    The same argument applies with regard to slavery. This needs to be said because, of all the weapons in theanti-American arsenal, the history of slavery is the one most worn with use. Make the argument that the American Constitution is a uniquely benign document that has served to keep an entire nation prosperous and free, and you will sooner or later be told that it was a slaveowners’ charter that valued some human beings at three fifths of the worth of others.
    There is, of course, some truth in this accusation, which was leveled at the time both by abolitionists in the United States and by British and American Tories who opposed the project of independence. “How is it that we hear the greatest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?” demanded the most eloquent British Tory of his generation, Dr. Johnson, in 1775.
    Once again, though, it needs to be remembered that Man is fallen. There isn’t a country on Earth that hasn’t done things in the past that, viewed from the vantage of the present, are shameful. The fact that a nation doesn’t always live up to its ideals, or justify its self-image, doesn’t mock those ideals or invalidate that self-image. On the contrary, it can spur the nation to greater effort. And, in the case of slavery, this is more or less what happened.
    It is perfectly legitimate, when discussing the U.S. Constitution and the vision of its authors, to draw attention to the persistence, first of slavery, then of codified racial segregation, and then of unofficial discrimination. Well into the 1950s, supporters of segregation, led by the veteran Georgia senator