Excerpt from Revolution and Politics, the Legacy of Independence: An Address by the Honorable Hubert H. Humphrey, on the Occasion of the Celebration of the Prelude to Independence, at the Eighteenth-Century Capitol, Williamsburg, Virginia, May 31, 1969This is indeed a beautiful day. No one could stand in this place at this time without feeling the importance of the hour and the occasion. And I am grateful for the invitation to join in celebrating the memory of the great Virginians whose decisions made here almost two centuries ago led the way to American independence.A celebration such as this has a direct bearing on our mental health as a people and as a nation. For in a very real sense a nation, like an individual, can be a victim of amnesia. If it loses the memory of its own past, it can be at a loss to know what it is in the present, and what it wants to be in the future.So, therefore, today, I want to dwell on the relationship between living Americans and a sense of the American past. I am convinced that this matter is of central importance to all other topics now at the focus of American attention.Every generation looks at the world through the prism of its own experiences and the present is always in contest with the past. My own generation was no exception.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.