Since our Independence 242 years ago, America has struggled with trials and disappointments, and our progress may seem too fast or too slow. Yet our course is certain if we abide by the bark of our character, and the stones of our founding.

In many ways, America has been a modern promised land. An unknown wilderness was before us, and we spent 200 years conquering it. The law, which fortified our gains, benignly gave us a grand rule of action for society. Our Founders drew great inspiration from Montesquieu who wrote in 1748 in The Spirit of Laws that when "virtue ceases, ambition enters those hearts that can admit it and avarice enters them all." A government of laws and not men was born from this belief. Character, which Greek etymology describes as a distinctive mark impressed, engraved, or otherwise formed," has had much to do with the dignity of American citizenship.

American citizenship was founded on conscience, not viewpoint - to be a bridge between popular diversions having no return point, and government assuming false levels of responsibility of its own. However, James Davison Hunter in a defining book some years ago titled The Death of Character says character today has been reduced "from a force of nature to a mere set of habits."

Though we "desperately want the flower of morality to bloom and multiply," he declares, "we have...pulled the past up and out from the soil that sustains it."

Hunter, though, thinks "a slow revolution in the moral order" may be occurring "within moral diversity again..." If so, it will be "about living for a purpose that is greater than the self....and so it beckons us forward....to translate character into destiny [and]...the expanse of the good that can be envisioned."

Character, by nature, is progressive. Whether our system allows it, the soul must. All of us seek a greater bond of perfectness in life, of the kind that takes us beyond our earlier ages of sod and steel - and even, now, the one of information. Our sod and steel eras bent character to production - or the world of "ought." The one of information aligns character to consumption - or living more as one "pleases."

In his classic Liberty and Virtue in the American Founding, Harvey Mansfield suggests a free people over one in shackles "needs the guidance of an inner force to replace the lack of external restraint." Virtue, he says, "cannot come from within unless it is voluntary and people are free to choose it." Today it's uncommon for a society based on liberty to make much of virtue, or one featuring virtue to have liberty equally. They are not seen as a likely pair.

In tomorrow's world, however, virtue and liberty need to work more together. While some see virtue connected mainly to religion, we at least should allow how truth cannot be stereotyped in a democracy that is forever evolving - opening its shores with time, moving the frontier of mind, always sure, always a guide, a forever light for a free people.

In a nation where truth and justice are claimed as the highest expression of the natural order and best embodiment of our ideals, doesn't character need again to be part of a storied vision? For character is life's line of moving hope. Centuries ago Plato told us character "must be proven far more rigorously than we prove gold in the furnace." Citizenship, then, is not only a system of static responsibilities but the very mind of tomorrow's American nation.

True citizen paths of spirit harbor their own rhythm and produce a unity larger than ourselves. It's not unlike the power of water or the sun in our lives. Floating on water lets us meet challenges with more calm authority and dominion than treading. The same rhythm holds with the sun. While clouds may come over us in life, the rays of the sun are continually fetching sunlight. They are never broken, no one ray blocks another, nothing can touch them, and we all possess them.

As it is said, "he who ruleth his spirit is better than he who taketh a city." (Prov. 16:32). Much as "fractals" in nature magnify or reduce similar shapes to a given image, we as a future Public Square collectively should wisely bend our character and citizenship into a greater or lesser reflection of the best in American life. Freedom possesses its own future voice and lungs. So the gifts it gives us, as we return them to others, can become The Public Square of tomorrow.

Freedom may be a measure, but it is not a quantity. No nation advances if its people do not hear its deepest impulses. A way must be found in our noisy, restless society to overcome the burden of the spiritless codes that divide us. Trading on more in life than information, truth, and character remain the chief nexus for staking out our world. They, like good fractals, help overcome division, traffic in the realm of our finest touchstones of thought, and will best preserve the American Dream.