文档介绍：1998年基础英语试卷Read the following passage:
ARCHIBALD MACLEISH: Bicentennial of What?
An address at the memoration of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia
It is mon human practice to answer questions without truly asking them and the American bicentennial is merely the latest instance. Everyone knows what the Bicentennial celebrates: the 200th anniversary of the adoption, by the Continental Congress, of the Declaration of Independence. But no one asks what the Bicentennial is because no one asks what the Declaration was. The instrument of announcing American independence from Great Britain? Clearly that: but is that all it was? Is it only American independence from Great Britain we are celebrating on July 4, 1976——only the instrument which declared our independence? There have been other declarations of unilateral independence from Great Britain which no one is likely to remember for 200 years, much less to celebrate.
“All men” are said in that document to be created equal and to have been endowed with certain unalienable rights. All governments are alleged to have been instituted among men to secure those rights —— to protect them. Are these, then, American rights? Doubtless——but only American? Is it the British Government which is declared to have violated them? Unquestionably——but the British Government alone? And the revolution against tyranny and arrogance which is here implied ——is it a revolution which American independence from the mediocre majesty of e III will win or is there something more intended? —— something for all mankind? ——for all the world?
In the old days when college undergraduates still read history, any undergraduate could have told you that these are not rhetorical questions: that they were, from the beginning, two opinions about the Declaration and that they were held by (among others) the two great men who had most to do with position and its adoption by the Congress.
John Adams, who supported the Declaration with all his fo