The Cause of All Mankind

A Memorial Day Reflection

2028 Presidential Campaign of Martin A. Ginsburg, RN

May 25, 2026

In January 1776, before there was a country to defend, before there was a flag to carry, before a single soldier had died in its name, Thomas Paine wrote a sentence that has never stopped being true.

The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind.

He did not say the cause of Americans. He did not say the cause of those who would eventually become citizens of the republic whose founding he was arguing for. He said mankind. All of it. The whole of the species, on every continent, under every sky, in every condition — free, enslaved, oppressed, and yet-to-be-born. The cause belonged to all of them before it belonged to any of them.

That sentence is the foundation on which every grave marker, every folded flag, every name on every wall is built. The men and women who gave everything in service of this country did not die for a flag. They died for the proposition. And the proposition was never small.

Paine made the scope of it explicit in the passage that may be the most stirring call to conscience in the history of American letters:

O ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose not only the tyranny but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the old world is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the Globe. Asia and Africa have long expelled her. Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.

This new world, Paine was saying, was not being established for the people already here. It was being established for freedom itself — which had been driven from every other place it had tried to rest. America was not a nation being born. It was a refuge being built. And the obligation of that refuge was not to its founders but to everyone who would ever need it.

The Declaration of Independence, written six months later, did not retreat from that scope. It opened with a claim that was not national but universal. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. Not all Americans. Not all colonists. Not all white men of property, though the men who wrote it fell far short of the standard their own words demanded. All men. The claim was universal from the first sentence. The people who died to establish it — and the people who have died in its name ever since — were dying for a principle whose reach extended beyond any border they could draw.

G.K. Chesterton came to this country in 1922 and observed, with the clarity that sometimes only an outsider possesses, that America was the only nation founded on a creed. That creed, he wrote, enunciates three things: that all men are equal in their claim to justice, that governments exist to give them that justice, and that their authority is for that reason just. The authority is conditional. It is earned by delivery, not by inheritance. A government that ceases to deliver justice ceases, by the terms of its own founding, to deserve its authority.

The soldiers buried under those grave markers understood this better than most of the people who sent them. They understood it not as political theory but as lived obligation — that the person beside them deserved to come home, that the people behind them deserved to live free, and that somewhere in the logic of what they were doing, the people beyond them deserved the same chance. They could not always have articulated it in those terms. They did not need to. They demonstrated it.

The Preamble to the Constitution speaks of securing the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. That word — posterity — has been read narrowly for two and a half centuries, as though it referred to bloodlines. To the children and grandchildren of those who signed. To the citizens yet to be born on American soil.

I do not read it that way. And I do not think the men who wrote it, whatever their many failures, intended it that way. Posterity is not lineage. It is inheritance. It is everyone who will live in the world these people were trying to build — everyone who will breathe the air of a planet where the proposition was tested and, at great cost, held.

Paine said the cause of America is the cause of all mankind. If that is true of the cause, it is true of the posterity. The blessings of liberty — if they are blessings at all — belong to the species. To every person on what the astronauts who first saw it whole described as a bright blue-green orb hanging in the dark: fragile, singular, shared.

Our posterity is not our direct lineage alone. It is everyone sharing that orb with us — every generation that will inherit the world we are building or failing to build, now, today, with the choices we make and the principles we keep or abandon.

The dead we honor today were not naive about this. They were not philosophers. Most of them were young people who had not yet lived enough to understand what they were giving. But they gave it. And what they gave it for was larger than any of them knew — larger than the country that sent them, larger than the conflict that claimed them, larger than the century they lived in.

They gave it for the proposition that all men are created equal and that governments exist to secure that equality. They gave it for the asylum Paine described — the place freedom comes when it has been driven from everywhere else. They gave it for a posterity that includes people who will never know their names, on continents they never visited, in languages they never spoke.

That is what we are honoring today. Not the uniform. Not the institution. The gift — and the scale of it.

Remember them. And then ask yourself what they gave it for — and whether we are giving them the answer they deserve.

Sources:

Paine, Thomas. Common Sense (1776). Primary source: Online Library of Liberty. https://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/1776-paine-common-sense-pamphlet — accessed 11MAY26 / 1300Z. Cited passages: 'The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind' and 'O! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.'

Chesterton, G.K. What I Saw in America (1922). Chapter: What Is America? Primary source: Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/27250/27250-h/27250-h.htm — accessed 11MAY26 / 1300Z. Cited passage: 'It enunciates that all men are equal in their claim to justice, that governments exist to give them that justice, and that their authority is for that reason just.'

The Declaration of Independence (1776). National Archives. https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript — accessed 11MAY26 / 1300Z.

The Constitution of the United States, Preamble (1789). National Archives. https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript — accessed 11MAY26 / 1300Z.

Martin A. Ginsburg, RN

2028 Presidential Campaign of Martin A. Ginsburg, RN