By Thomas L. Krannawitter Posted June 19, 2002

In 1858, as Americans were increasingly of the mind that chattel slavery was not necessarily a bad thing — that it was, perhaps, a "positive good" — Abraham Lincoln remarked,

In America public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. Consequently he who moulds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions. He makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed.

Lincoln understood, as few if any of his contemporaries did, that if the American mind forgets the principles of the American Founding, the cause of freedom in America has little chance of success. At the core of those principles and that cause is the simple idea of human equality, which in Lincoln's day was increasingly rejected and scorned. Lincoln's actions and words were designed specifically to remind Americans of that simple idea, ushering in a "new birth of freedom" for America. Today America is no longer divided over the question of slavery. Rather we are split between those who would govern themselves and live responsibly and independently, and those who would indulge their base appetites and rely on government to provide for them when they fail to provide for themselves. We have among us those who believe government should exercise only those powers delegated to it by the Constitution, and those who think the power and scope of government evolves over time and is, in principle, unlimited. There are some today who are wary of what Tocqueville called "soft despotism" — the gradual centralization of the administrative and regulatory power of government — and those who champion centralized government as a blessing of "social justice." The principles of freedom, however, never change. The antidote to the creeping growth of government today is the same antidote to the problem of slavery: the principles of the American Founding and the moral and political implications bound up in them. The real crisis today is that few people understand those principles, or believe them to be true. Even among those who seek a return to limited, constitutional government, few are able to offer a principled public defense of it. We at the Claremont Institute aim to change that. One way is through our Abraham Lincoln Fellowship program. Taking its bearings from the statesmanship of its namesake, the Lincoln Fellowship program is an intensive seminar on the moral and political principles of the American Founding. The program attracts some of the most talented conservatives working in the trenches of American politics, and we welcome them in our struggle to restore constitutional government in America. Go to:

• The 2002 Lincoln Fellowship