While in midst of doing some " historical homework" about hometown(s) of Hadley and Amherst, MA (Amherst broke off from the former a century after its founding in 1659), I came across this interesting page that I believe was created by Old Deerfield Village and Deerfield Academy (up river from where I'm typing this.)
http://memorialhall.mass.edu/collection/viewer.jspThis article and several others similiar to it (listed on the same page) can help us sit back, take a breath, and realize this issue will always be one of those "perennials" so long as this nation remains committed to its basic underlying principles of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution/Bill of Rights and Lincoln's additions (contained and beautifully outlined in his subsequent Gettysburg Address) to preserve what our 16th President called the "last best hope of earth" in his Annual Message to Congress, on Dec. 1, 1862.
http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/speeches/congress.htm Lincoln also warned in the same sentence that we could also "meanly lose" what so many have worked hard to create and die for not only on so many battlefields here and overseas; but there's a greater danger I see growing every day: the sclerosis of economic selfishness that's causing a hardening of so many attidudes towards so many poor, albeit more eager to work aliens, legal or otherwise, and most horribly, the spiking of our b irthrates, highlighted by an estimated death toll of 50M unborn children since January 1973. It's not just dollars and cents, votes and that stuff: this gets right to the heart of our Church's longstanding MORAL teachings, all 2,000 years worth of them.
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