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I am aware that those who advocate these measures which we have been discussing are denounced as dangerous radicals.  I am particularly interested to observe that the men who cry out most loudly against what they call radicalism are the men who find that their private game in politics is being spoiled.  Who are the arch-conservatives nowadays?  Who are the men who utter the most fervid praise of the Constitution of the United States and the constitutions of the states?  They are the gentlemen who used to get behind those documents to play hide-and-seek with the people whom they pretended to serve.  They are the men who entrenched themselves in the laws which they misinterpreted and misused.  If now they are afraid that “radicalism” will sweep them away,—­and I believe it will,—­they have only themselves to thank.

Yet how absurd is the charge that we who are demanding that our government be made representative of the people and responsive to their demands,—­how fictitious and hypocritical is the charge that we are attacking the fundamental principles of republican institutions!  These very men who hysterically profess their alarm would declaim loudly enough on the Fourth of July of the Declaration of Independence; they would go on and talk of those splendid utterances in our earliest state constitutions, which have been copied in all our later ones, taken from the Petition of Rights, or the Declaration of Rights, those great fundamental documents of the struggle for liberty in England; and yet in these very documents we read such uncompromising statements as this:  that, when at any time the people of a commonwealth find that their government is not suitable to the circumstances of their lives or the promotion of their liberties, it is their privilege to alter it at their pleasure, and alter it in any degree.  That is the foundation, that is the very central doctrine, that is the ground principle, of American institutions.

I want you to read a passage from the Virginia Bill of Rights, that immortal document which has been a model for declarations of liberty throughout the rest of the continent: 

    That all power is vested in, and consequently derived from, the
    people; that magistrates are their trustees and servants, and at all
    times amenable to them.

That government is, or ought to be, instituted for the common benefit, protection, and security of the people, nation, or community; of all the various modes and forms of government, that is the best which is capable of producing the greatest degree of happiness and safety, and is most effectually secured against the danger of mal-administration; and that, when any government shall be found inadequate or contrary to these purposes, a majority of the community bath an indubitable, inalienable, and indefeasible right to reform, alter, or abolish it, in such manner as shall be judged most conducive