[ZULU]

Well, I think its a great document, but I believe the Declaration of Independence was the greater document.

The significant part of the Declaration has little to do with the war with King George III, or we would have merely exchanged one foreign Monarch for another domestic one.

The significance of the Declaration was the fact that it laid out - for the first time - a basic premise of government we all take for granted today.

The fact that the government derives its just powers from the people, not from the state or rulers, that there are certain basic human rights no government has any legitimate authority to take away as they are granted to all men as a birthright from God, and that any valid government is based on a pact or understanding between the people and their government recognizing those basic human rights. Also it clearly states that the people have a duty and responsibility to alter any government which acts in a tyrannical manner by assuming that the people's rights are granted by the state, not given at birth by God to all men, and hence may be arbitrarily abridged by the rulers. A situation which is drawing dangerously close with each passing decade here.


Without the Declaration of Independence, there simply would have been no Constitution, and the former was a unique document in all respects. The Constitution, as an framework for the operation of a state, is in itself not a unique concept, although the ideas enshrined therein are.

[djf]

I agree the Declaration is the best.

The Constitution only covers powers and responsibilities. The only part that really concerns rights is the BOR, added as somewhat of an afterthought.

But the Declaration is full of commentary about the nature of free men. And the government that serves them. There is a moral and ethical component to it that is absent from the Constitution. It is really, almost, Locke's "On Civil Government" reduced to a shorter form.

Jefferson was brilliant. Possibly the most brilliant man who ever lived.

[E Rocc]

Without the Declaration of Independence, there simply would have been no Constitution, and the former was a unique document in all respects. The Constitution, as an framework for the operation of a state, is in itself not a unique concept, although the ideas enshrined therein are.

While the Declaration was important, it was more a statement of "why" than anything else. The Constitution was a statement of "how". For the first time, it established a nation where the individual was superior, where one's own conscience trumped the whims of the government or the strictures of any given religious faith. It established the things that the people would allow government to do, instead of the opposite. It established ways to guarantee and preserve these limitations. Finally, it established a way to amend itself when it was clearly neccesary.

It was the Constitution that established this Nation as the greatest the world has ever seen.

-Eric