The Public Square has sought to tell the story of our citizenship in some dozen columns now. We've examined its roots, its movement, and its progression and glory, across American history.

This story began as one of pride in a new clarity of rights and responsibilities, then our unity as a people through social cohesion, and more recently a consolidation of citizen services. The latest evolution, however, underestimates our compassion and capacity to make a difference - and is softly draining energy from our citizenship code.

The Public Square strongly feels the quality of our citizenship is the foundation stone of our future architecture as a nation. We do not live on a flat canvas in life. Citizenship must be built on a three dimensional and moving canvas. Of what then are our these future building blocks, these "citizen stones" made?

How can we make ourselves tomorrow as internally rich as we are, in some cases, externally? As we've shown, to "act" is to take the initiative. To act is to instruct ourselves, and to instruct ourselves well good ethics should prevail. This imports character into our daily life.

The inner right of conscience is perhaps the ultimate Republican principle. We are only now glimpsing this founding element of our public genius more fully. The principle allows us to perceive better over worse. It is the basis for how individual reformation is also the only true and durable path to social betterment.

Like a tree needing the proper nutrients, as individuals, we must absorb the right assumptions about life. Good assumptions help us grow in temperament and robustly manage tomorrow as well or better than today. They allow us to fulfill life's rising stream of expectations by pushing aside stumbling blocks and forging fresh stepping stones.

Unlike a tree which grows, changes matures, and provides shade to others, however, there is a difference. Trees don't do their own pruning. But we as citizens do. It's the way we sift the wheat from the tares, the way we level up rather than down, in our experience. Because our inner lives - or the eye of the soul - continuously speak to us, we are asked to make ourselves better. This progression of mind is not likely to vanish from us.

We need to remember we grew into a nation primarily to cast aside individual limitation. For the Public Square, then, character is the primary element of citizenship. It is through only a slowly acquired and very strong self-government that our citizenship ultimately benefits both the government and the people. The stones of character do for us what, in architecture, they do for structure. The give us some sense of dominion.

Freedom is a historically expensive gift. Abraham Lincoln once visualized freedom is an "apple of gold" housed in a "silver frame." The golden apple is the Declaration of Independence, and the silver frame is The Constitution. Our natural rights clearly are outside the Constitution, but hardly independent of it.

The Constitution protects in fundamental law what the Declaration asserts as first law - the thriving of the individual. It's no irony the Constitutional Convention met in the very room where the Declaration of Independence was crafted. The Ninth Amendment connects the two, by simply stating: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

The government gives us law so that we can be the foundation stones of its morality. Citizenship is our 240 year model to the world, but the government has largely drifted from this model. The government, unable to change easily, has forgotten it is there to do its vital work but in the end mainly set the individual forever beyond government.

Only faintly can we productively anticipate the future without wasting monumental amounts of time. Citizenship must remain the river of life for Americans, however. Just as a river stays true to its unique currents and boundaries - our citizenship is there to fuse heart and order in our lives.

We all can become "apples of gold," a part of the tree of liberty. In many ways, life is the angle of our vision. The roots of our evolution of citizenship are so fundamental, so clear, and the possibilities so great, that the architecture of the nation we have built, along with the present state of need, suggest a course not dissimilar to the one The Public Square is advocating.