“However terror breeds terror and persecution brings its own reaction. The Libertarian element in the population, normally unorganized, were forced into protective coloration, but were not defeated. Under the pressure of necessity they organized, secretly and underground. They placed candidates in the field for their next congressional election and prepared to win at any cost. An underground terrorist group was formed by the more headstrong which undertook to hand the Knights some of their own medicine. The more conservative turned their attention to the coming election and flooded the country with pamphlets which denied that the Scudderites were more than a small part of the population and urged the people to vote their convictions. Election day was a shambles and the counting of the ballots resolved itself into a multitude of little battles between the Knights and the embattled individualists. When the smoke had cleared away it became evident that Scudder had lost the election. He had been heavily defeated on both coasts and clearly lost the majority of the seats in the larger cities of the valley. Even if he were conceded all the disputed contests in his rural strongholds, he nevertheless had lost every state but Tennessee and Alabama.
“The members of the new congress who had been elected on an anti-Scudder ticket were pledged to constitutional reforms to prevent a recurrence of loss of individual liberty from any cause. In consequence several hundred amendments were proposed in the first few days of the term. The parliamentary impasses resulted in a clever piece of law making. At a caucus of the Libertarians it was proposed and agreed to that a small representative committee draft and submit to the caucus an amendment in the form of a new constitution which, if adopted and ratified, would supersede the old constitution in toto. The committee consisted of five men and one woman, great minds all of them; Cyrus Fielding, Rosa Weinstein, John Delano Roosevelt, Ludvig Dixon, Joseph Berzowski, and Colin MacDonald. Fielding presided and apportioned the work. I wish we had time to go into the details of their discussions. They labored night and day for nearly four months. Fortunately we have a record of their entire proceedings which you can study at your leisure, and there are several excellent abridgments available. Their report was submitted to the caucus on 2028 April 20 and was debated in caucus for three weeks, but the members of the committee had done their work so well and in particular had been so skillful in retaining most of the wording of the original document, the new amendment was approved by the caucus without change and submitted as a single bill signed by every member of the caucus. Its adoption of course was a forgone conclusion. It was ratified by the thirty-seventh state on 2028 November 12.
“I won’t go into the minutiae of the document but several changes are worthy of note tonight. The most important was the addition of a new restriction on the power of government. Henceforth no law was constitutional that deprived any citizen of any liberty of action which did not interfere with the equal freedom of action of another citizen. Pardon me, I have stated that badly. These are the words of the new constitution: ‘Every citizen is free to perform any act which does not hamper the equal freedom of another. No law shall forbid the performance of any act, which does not damage the physical or economic welfare of any other person. No act shall constitute a violation of a law valid under this provision unless there is such damage, or immediate present danger of such damage resulting from that act.’
“Do you see the significance of that last provision? Up to that time, a crime had two elements; act of commission and intent. Now it had a third; harmful effect which must be proved in each case, as well as the act and the intent. The consequences of this change can hardly be exaggerated. It established American individualism forever by requiring the state to justify in each case its interference with an individual’s acts. Furthermore the justification must be based on a tangible damage or potential damage to a person or persons. The person damaged might be a schoolgirl injured or endangered by a reckless driver or it might be every person in the state endangered by the betrayal of military secrets or injured by manipulation of commodity prices, but it must not be some soulless super-person, the state incarnate, or the majesty of the law. It reduced the state to its proper size, an instrument to serve individuals, instead of a god to be worshipped and glorified. Most especially it ended the possibility of the majority oppressing any minority with that hackneyed hoary lie that ‘the majority is always right.’