The bell is old and it is badly cracked and it has not been rung for years, nor will it ever be rung again. But although it is quite useless from a practical standpoint, it is perhaps the most prized possession we have. It carries words about proclaiming liberty to all the people, and when it spoke it set off long echoes that have never stopped reverberating. The Liberty Bell announced that the American people were in fact making a revolution and not just demonstrating for a redress of grievances, and few announcements in the history of the human race have been more momentous.

This year we who own the bell are celebrating the two hundredth anniversary of the independence which that bell proclaimed: the Bicentennial of the American Revolution, which is being observed in an infinite number of ways, some of them impressive, others rather regrettable, but all of them testifying to our belief that the occasion which is being celebrated was extremely important, to ourselves and to others. This belief is of course entirely justified, but the American revolution has dimensions that ought to get a great deal more consideration than we ordinarily give them. To name just two of them: it changed everything—and it is still going on.

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