If you think about the political systems of Europe in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia,

for most of human history, most of the world was governed by hierarchical rulers.

There were kings and pharaohs and chieftains and aristocrats and

emperors, one person, or a small group, the few, ruled over the many. Each person in these hierarchical

societies knew their place, and by and large, and for the most part, the social status into which

they were born would be theirs for the whole of their lives and the lives

of their children. Human society, almost everywhere in the world, was remarkably settled.

Now, I don't mean that there weren't wars and famine and that the life of a person didn't

have traumatic things that happened. I mean that the social categories were static. If you were

born a farmer, you watched your

father try and scratch a living out of the earth, and you learned to do what he did, before in time

you would pass that station and that way of life onto your son. Now, democracy in America changed

all that. It changed it first because in America there were no recognized vestiges of aristocratic hierarchy.

And it changed it because the hallmark of the American constitutional system was the political fact

that all men are created equal.

Now, of course, the American regime did not yet live up to that ambition, and a great many

were inhumanely kept as slaves. But the ideal of equality was

so deeply embedded at the foundation of the American Republic that when, in time, the war over

slavery was fought, President Lincoln could argue that we were engaged in a great battle over

the principle of America, the principle of equality. Equality leads to freedom. That's because if every person is created equal,

then no other person has the right to tell anyone else what to do.

And America has been through its history, perhaps the freest nation on earth.

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