As we celebrate our independence on the Fourth of July, Americans would do well to reflect upon what’s necessary for a nation conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, to long endure.
A free people requires an education in the civic knowledge and virtues necessary to preserve liberty.
In his 1838 Lyceum Address, a young Abraham Lincoln—then a state legislator in Illinois—reflected on “the perpetuation of our political institutions” in the wake of the killing of Elijah Lovejoy, an outspoken abolitionist who ran an anti-slavery newspaper, at the hands of a bloodthirsty mob.
Lincoln warned that although no foreign power could conquer us, destruction could come from within if the rule of law were to be replaced by the rule of the mob.
Lawlessness begets anarchy, he noted. If “the vicious portion of [the]…
