"Government is instituted for the common good" Alexander Hamilton in Federalist #22

 

December 14, 1787, "Government is instituted for the common good; for the protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness of the people; and not for profit, honor, or private interest of any one man, family, or class of men; therefore, the people alone have an incontestable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to institute government; and to reform, alter, or totally change the same, when their protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness require it."   -- Alexander Hamilton   (1757-1804)   Source: Federalist No. 22.

In 1873 “As commerce, education and the rapid transition of thought and matter by telegraph and steam have changed everything, I rather believe that the great Maker is preparing the world to become one nation, speaking one language, a consummation which will render armies and navies no longer necessary.”  General of the Armies/President Ulysses S. Grant (born in Ohio, buried in New York City)

In 1945 "We believe that peace and security can be established and assured only if we, the sovereign people, who, for our own safety and well-being have delegated parts of our sovereignty to cities to handle our municipal affairs, to departments, counties, provinces, cantons or states to take care of departmental, county, provincial, cantonal or state issues, [and] to our national governments to attend to national problems -- [in order] to protect ourselves against the danger of inter-national wars, now delegate part of our respective sovereignty to bodies capable of creating and applying Law in inter-national relations."--Emery Reves, The Anatomy of Peace

“World federation is an idea that will not die.  More and more people are coming to realize that peace must be more than an interlude if we are to survive.  That peace is a product of law and order;  that law is essential if the force of arms is not to rule the world. “   Justice William O. Douglas (died 1980)

In 1949 the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate in the House Concurrent Resolution 64 stated:  Resolved by the House of Representatives, the Senate concurring, that it is the sense of the Congress that is should be a fundamental objective of the foreign policy of the United States to support and strengthen the United Nations and to seek its development into a world federation, open to all nations, with defined and limited powers adequate to preserve peace and prevent aggression through the enactment, interpretation, and enforcement of world law.   Four Republican US Presidents have endorsed “world peace through law” proposals: Ulysses S. Grant, Teddy Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Dwight David Eisenhower.

And on September 11, 1990 (exactly 11 years before the 9-11 ‘terrorist’ attack on the US) President George Bush Senior called for a new world order.  Imagine where the world would be today if those in power transitioned to this ‘rule of law instead of the law of force’ global legal system now sustained nearly for nearly 8 decades. 

Historian Toynbee, after examining the history, development, and fall of various civilizations which have flowered, concludes:  “As a rule the demand for codification (of law) reaches its climax in the penultimate age before a social catastrophe, long after the peak of achievement in jurisprudence has been passed, and when the legislators of the day are irretrievable on the run in a losing battle with ungovernable forces of destruction …”

Nearly 250 years ago near the end of the second profound paragraph of the 1776 Declaration of Independence there is another profound warning, “all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed.”  

Abraham Lincoln wrote that this document is our “Apple of Gold”.  And the U.S. ‘Constitution its Silver frame’.   What is now urgently needed is exposing the silver frame’s failure and shine light on the enlightenment of “self-evident” “Truths”.  

This is now a job offered Rotary, Rotarians, and the rest of humanity if any intend to achieve the seven intentions within the Preamble of the US Constitution.   And the new book soon to be published "Seven Bridges to Peace".  A Positive Peace that can be both and inspiration and study guide for the wisdom humanity now needs, instead of more intelligence.