The Signers of the Declaration of Independence concluded with a famous and solemn pledge: their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor. This was no small matter. What they called “revolution” was, from the British perspective, treason against the Crown—punishable by death.

Yet, the Signers stood firm, launching the greatest experiment in self-government the world has ever witnessed. This movement was held together by a powerful kind of social and political glue: trust.

The pledge they made was not to God or to the general public—it was a promise to each other. They understood that if some broke that trust when challenges arose—and the challenges would soon become daunting—others might do the same, and the revolution would fail.

Betraying their mutual trust would likely mean that each would die in vain and that freedom would have to wait for another time and place. Instead, they honored their trust at great costs paid in blood, money, and suffering.

Our freedom today—or what remains of it—is the legacy of their extraordinary loyalty to and trust in one another.

Without mutual civic trust, there could have been no American Revolution, no American Founding. Freedom, after all, depends on citizens trusting one another enough to govern themselves: to run their businesses as they see fit, to raise and educate their children responsibly, and to make their own choices and live with the results.

Live and let live is the attitude of free men and women, an attitude rooted in trust.

The Founders recognized an important reason free citizens can trust one another: None of us, as ordinary individuals, has the legal power to confiscate property or violate the rights of others. I cannot take what belongs to you—by law—or dictate how you must live, and you cannot do the same to me. Neither of us poses the threat of legalized force to the other. This mutual limitation is why we can trust one another.

As ordinary fellow citizens, should one of us steal from or violate the rights of others, it would be a breach of law, not a rightful exercise of legal authority. The criminal and civil codes exist precisely to restore justice when citizens act unjustly toward each other.

There is, however, one group of people who do possess and exercise legalized force: those in government. Government alone holds the monopoly on legalized force, which is why government issues commands (such as paying taxes), not requests.

This is precisely why, as the Founders argued, we ought to distrust those in government: Those who have their hands on the levers of government power are often tempted to abuse or misuse that power. It is why We the People ratified a Constitution that limits the powers we have delegated to those who serve within our government.

As Thomas Jefferson famously wrote in the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798:

– [F]ree government is founded in jealousy and not in confidence; it is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited Constitutions to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power.

In short, freedom rests on two pillars: wide mutual civic trust among fellow citizens and distrust of government power. Only by maintaining this delicate balance can liberty endure.