Political Discussions
Favored Framers And Founding Father Quotes
Posted by libertycast1 • 6/11/09 • Subscribe to this Discussion [RSS] • Report This Topic
Topics: founding fathers, freedom, history, liberty, politics, quotes
Well I felt compelled to put this up and see just who might be interested in participating in this.
"Give me liberty, or give me death!"
- Patrick Henry
"Our peculiar security is in possession of a written Constitution. Let us not make it a blank paper by construction."
- Thomas Jefferson
"By the policy to which we have adhered since the days of Washington ... we have done more for the cause of liberty than arms could effect; we have shown to other nations the way to greatness and happiness ... Far better is it for ourselves ... and the cause of liberty, that, adhering to our pacific system and avoiding the distant wars of Europe, we should keep our lamp burning brightly on this western shore, as a light to all nations, than to hazard its utter extinction amid the ruins of fallen and falling republics of Europe."
- Henry Clay (Yes, I know this is one generation right out of the subject but was still born into it fully understood it.
"Whenever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will be her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all..."
- John Quincy Adams
"All the perplexities, confusions, and distress of America, arise, not from the defects in their Constitution or Confederation, not from a want of honor or virtue, so much as the downright ignorance of the nature of the coin, credit, and circulation."
- Thomas Jefferson
"... give pleasure to every citizen in proportion to his love of justice and his knowledge of the true springs of public prosperity. The loss which America has sustained since the peace, from the pestilent effects of paper money on the necessary confidence between man and man, on the necessary confidence in the public councils, on the industry and morals of the people, and on the character of republican government, constitutes an enormous debt against the States changeable with this unadvised measure."
- James Madison
User Comments
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"We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others, the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men's labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name - liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names - liberty and tyranny."
- Abraham Lincoln, address at Sanitary Fair,Baltimore, Maryland (April 18, 1864)-
I wonder how Abe defined Liberty... Annual Message to Congress, December 3, 1861
"In my present position I could scarcely be justified were I to omit raising a warning voice against this approach of returning despotism.
It is not needed nor fitting here that a general argument should be made in favor of popular institutions, but there is one point, with its connections, not so hackneyed as most others, to which I ask a brief attention. It is the effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor in the structure of government. It is assumed that labor is available only in connection with capital; that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it induces him to labor. This assumed, it is next considered whether it is best that capital shall hire laborers, and thus induce them to work by their own consent, or buy them and drive them to it without their consent. Having proceeded so far, it is naturally concluded that all laborers are either hired laborers or what we call slaves. And further, it is assumed that whoever is once a hired laborer is fixed in that condition for life.
Now there is no such relation between capital and labor as assumed, nor is there any such thing as a free man being fixed for life in the condition of a hired laborer. Both these assumptions are false, and all inferences from them are groundless.
Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights. Nor is it denied that there is, and probably always will be, a relation between labor and capital producing mutual benefits...
...there is not of necessity any such thing as the free hired laborer being fixed to that condition for life. Many independent men everywhere in these States a few years back in their lives were hired laborers. The prudent, penniless beginner in the world labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself, then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. This is the just and generous and prosperous system which opens the way to all, gives hope to all, and consequent energy and progress and improvement of condition to all. No men living are more worthy to be trusted than those who toil up from poverty; none less inclined to take or touch aught which they have not honestly earned. Let them beware of surrendering a political power which they already possess, and which if surrendered will surely be used to close the door of advancement against such as they and to fix new disabilities and burdens upon them till all of liberty shall be lost." -- Abraham Lincoln, Annual Message to Congress, December 3, 1861
He also quotes this address in his Reply to the New York Workingmen; 74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:1a0-yn6V_sgJ:www.theageoflincoln.com/ageoflin... -
Not that this really needs to be said, but labor isn't entirely independent thereof; it just most certainly is not dependent. Labor is most certainly a variable cost but is necessary to calculate costs though it relates more so to production in figures anyway.
Basically labor is not entirely independent of capital unless it is to be free of production. Otherwise it, directly, has nothing to do with it. -
I was merely comparing Abe's ideology to Mark Levin's revisionist take on the quote that I replied to.
Whereas Levin would have you believe that Lincoln was some sort of Reaganite, in reality he juxtaposed unmitigated capitalism to Feudalism rather than Socialism to Feudalism.
"It continues to develop that the insurrection is largely, if not exclusively, a war upon the first principle of popular government--the rights of the people. Conclusive evidence of this is found in the most grave and maturely considered public documents, as well as in the general tone of the insurgents. In those documents we find the abridgment of the existing right of suffrage and the denial to the people of all right to participatein the selection of public officers except the legislative boldly advocated, with labored arguments to prove that large control of the people in government is the source of all political evil. Monarchy itself is sometimes hinted at as a possible refuge from the power of the people. In my present position I could scarcely be justified were I to omit raising a warning voice against this approach of returning despotism."--Ibid
Levin is either simply pulling quotes out of his butt... OR, more likely, deliberately decieving his audience in order to serve his own agenda. A sound argument need not lie
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@Agit8r - I seriously doubt that Lincoln was advocating the taking of property by the government. What he was doing in the speech to the New York Workingmen’s Democratic Republican Association, other than thanking them for honorary membership, was attempting to address an incident where some workers had hanged some other workers. To this end he said -
"The most notable feature of a disturbance in your city last summer, was the hanging of some working people by other working people. It should never be so. The strongest bond of human sympathy, outside of the family relation, should be one uniting all working people, of all nations, and tongues, and kindreds. Nor should this lead to a war upon property, or the owners of property. Property is the fruit of labor ---property is desirable --- --- is a positive good in the world." -
Is it really that necessary the Lincoln's position on Whig policy be brought up?
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*blinks* I wasn't aware Lincoln wore a wig...
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Abe wasn't promoting anarchy, or communism, but he was far from a market fundementalist. Could you picture Reagan saying:
"Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration"
...or comparing the plight of the Northern wage-laborer to the Southern slave? o_0
well... maybe back when he was a union rep
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When you read more intimate material on the history of Lincoln you will learn that he agreed with the whig positions on economics more than he agreed with his own party. Okay there I said it.
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Then why did Lord Acton oppose him (I'm assuming that you mean English Whig, as the American Whig party was much the same as the Republicans)
"I saw in States Rights the only availing check upon the absolutism of he sovereign will, and secession filled me with hope, not as the destruction but as the redemption of Democracy. . . . I deemed that you were fighting the battles of our liberty, our progress, and our civilization; and I mourn for the stake which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo." -- Lord Acton
o_0
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"May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God."--Thomas Jefferson (to Roger C. Weightman, June 24, 1826)
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"What you talkin' 'bout Willis?" - Gary Coleman
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"I like big butts and I cannot lie..." Ooops, sorry. :-(
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"Notwithstanding the general progress made within the two last centuries in favour of this branch of liberty, & the full establishment of it, in some parts of our Country, there remains in others a strong bias towards the old error, that without some sort of alliance or coalition between Gov' & Religion neither can be duly supported: Such indeed is the tendency to such a coalition, and such its corrupting influence on both the parties, that the danger cannot be too carefully guarded against"--James Madison, (Letter to Edward Livingston, July 10, 1822,)
"It is one of the serious evils of our present system of banking that it enables one class of society--and that by no means a numerous one--by its control over the currency, to act injuriously upon the interests of all the others and to exercise more than its just proportion of influence in political affairs. The agricultural, the mechanical, and the laboring classes have little or no share in the direction of the great moneyed corporations... they have but little patronage to give to the press, and exercise but a small share of influence over it; they have no crowd of dependents about them, who hope to grow rich without labour, by their countenance and favour, and who are, therefore, always ready to execute their wishes" --Andrew Jackson (Farewell Address) -
If they are good workmen, they may be from Asia, Africa or Europe; they may be Mahometans, Jews, Christians of any sect, or they may be Atheists.... [George Washington, to Tench Tighman, March 24, 1784, when asked what type of workman to get for Mount Vernon, from The Washington papers edited by Saul Padover]
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"if objects for gratitude and admiration are our desire, do they not present themselves every hour to our eyes? Do we not see a fair creation prepared to receive us the instant we are born --a world furnished to our hands, that cost us nothing? Is it we that light up the sun; that pour down the rain; and fill the earth with abundance? Whether we sleep or wake, the vast machinery of the universe still goes on. Are these things, and the blessings they indicate in future, nothing to, us? Can our gross feelings be excited by no other subjects than tragedy and suicide? Or is the gloomy pride of man become so intolerable, that nothing can flatter it but a sacrifice of the Creator?" -- Thomas Paine, 'Age of Reason'
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"the moral duty of man consists in imitating the moral goodness and beneficence of God manifested in the creation towards all his creatures. That seeing as we daily do the goodness of God to all men, it is an example calling upon all men to practise the same towards each other; and, consequently, that every thing of persecution and revenge between man and man, and every thing of cruelty to animals, is a violation of moral duty" -- Thomas Paine, 'Age of Reason'
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"As I understand the Christian religion, it was, and is, a revelation. But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed?" -- John Adams, letter to F.A. Van der Kamp, Dec. 27, 1816
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"I am persuaded, that if mankind would dare to exercise their reason as freely on those divine topics as they do in the common concerns of life, they would, in a great measure, rid themselves of their blindness and superstition, gain more exalted ideas of God and their obligations to him and one another, and be proportionally delighted and blessed with the views of his moral government, make better members of society, and acquire, manly powerful incentives to the practice of morality, which is the last and greatest perfection that human nature is capable of." -- Ethan Allan; 'Reason: The Only Oracle Of Man'
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"legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property, only taking care to let their subdivisions go hand in hand with the natural affections of the human mind. The descent of property of every kind therefore to all the children, or to all the brothers and sisters, or other relations in equal degree is a politic measure, and a practicable one. Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise." -- Thomas Jefferson, (press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch15s32.html)
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"It is a position not to be controverted that the earth, in its natural, cultivated state was, and ever would have continued to be, the common property of the human race. In that state every man would have been born to property. He would have been a joint life proprietor with rest in the property of the soil, and in all its natural productions, vegetable and animal."-- Thomas Paine; 'Agrarian Justice'
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Not a founding father, but recommended reading of some founding fathers:
"whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labor above their actual rate... The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily... [than] the man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion... The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life." -- Adam Smith; 'The Wealth of Nations -
I like these quotes a lot. I find them useful around church ladies.
John Adams said, "This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it."
Franklin also said, "Lighthouses are more useful than churches."
Thomas Jefferson said, “Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man.” -
"If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions." - James Madison
"Government is not reason. Government is not eloquence. It is force. And, like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master." - George Washington
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves." - William Pitt -
"It is only when the people become ignorant and corrupt, when they degenerate into a populace, that they are incapable of exercising the sovereignty. Usurpation is then an easy attainment... Let us by all wise and constitutional measures promote intelligence among the people as the best means of preserving our liberties." -- James Monroe; 'First Inaugural Address'
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Hey Sati! Got any good quotes for this post?
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to compensate for any lack of input from the Democratic camp, I drug this discussion about as far left as is possible
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haha
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I am definitely a Democrat. Check out my blog: rightardia.blogspot.com/
TJ--“Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.” -
@eelder1: When people are not well-informed about their government, the government is even less trustworthy then they are!
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"...the rights of the whole can be no more than the sum of the rights of the individuals." -- Thomas Jefferson; to James Madison, Sept. 6, 1789
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"The great object should be to combat the evil: 1. By establishing a political equality among all; 2. By witholding unnecessary opportunities from a few to increase the inequality of property by an immoderate, and especially an unmerited, accumulation of riches; 3. By the silent operation of laws which, without violating the rights of property, reduce extreme wealth towards a state of mediocrity and raise extreme indigence towards a state of comfort; 4. By abstaining from measures which operate differently on different interests, and particularly such as favor one interest at the expense of another; 5. By making one party a check on the other so far as the existence of parties cannot be prevented nor their views accommodated. If this is not the language of reason, it is that of republicanism."-- James Madison; 'Parties' (1792)
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"wealth is no proof of moral character; nor poverty of the want of it. On the contrary, wealth is often the presumptive evidence of dishonesty; and poverty the negative evidence of innocence." -- Thomas Paine; 'Dissertation on the First Principles of Government'
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"The protection of a man's person is more sacred than the protection of property; and besides this, the faculty of performing any kind of work or services by which he acquires a livelihood, or maintaining his family, is of the nature of property." -- Ibid
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Doesn't what happens with property affect person? I'm thinking in particular of losing your jobs, your home, your privately-owned blog, or your health insurance or having your car utterly disintegrate at 60 MPH on the freeway because, after all, it was just your property!
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It seems to me that Paine is speaking of the vast concentrations of property in Europe at the time, that spelled a shortened life for those excluded from it.
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@Agit8r: I think Europe turned out okay.
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"In its larger and juster meaning, [the term 'Property'] embraces every thing to which a man may attach a value and have a right; and which leaves to every one else the like advantage.
In the former sense, a man's land, or merchandize, or money is called his property.
In the latter sense, a man has a property in his opinions and the free communication of them.
He has a property of peculiar value in his religious opinions, and in the profession and practice dictated by them.
He has a property very dear to him in the safety and liberty of his person.
He has an equal property in the free use of his faculties and free choice of the objects on which to employ them.
In a word, as a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights." -- James Madison; 'Property' (1792) -
"I have always believed that the best security for property, be it much or little, is to remove from every part of the community, as far as can possibly be done, every cause of complaint, and every motive to violence" -- Thomas Paine; 'Dissertations on First Principles of Government' (1795)
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“The Gothic idea that we are to look backwards instead of forwards for the improvement of the human mind, and to recur to the annals of our ancestors for what is most perfect in government, in religion and in learning, is worthy of those bigots in religion & government, by whom it has been recommended, & whose purposes it would answer.” --Thomas Jefferson; letter to Dr. Joseph Priestly (Jan, 27, 1800)
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A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.
Thomas Jefferson -
"I think we have more machinery of government than is
necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the
industrious." ---Thomas Jefferson-
keep them corporate welfare denunciations coming! we love that here
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Not to mention the CEOs of AIG, BOfA, et. al. -
that's corporate welfare too. They work for corporations, and they would not be getting paid if the companies went bankrupt.
these people need to stop asking for a handout and start working for a living
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@Agit8r: So we agree then...
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"But besides the danger of a direct mixture of Religion & civil Government, there is an evil which ought to be guarded agst in the indefinite accumulation of property from the capacity of holding it in perpetuity by ecclesiastical corporations. The power of all corporations, ought to be limited in this respect. The growing wealth acquired by them never fails to be a source of abuses."
-- James Madison; 'Monopolies Perpetuities Corporations'-
Where is this "evil witch?"
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Antie Em, Auntie Em?
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Don't forget Toto, too.
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There's no place like gnome
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"Of all occupations those are the least desirable in a free state which produce the most servile dependence of one class of citizens on another class. This dependence must increase as the mutuality of wants is diminished. Where the wants on one side are the absolute necessaries and on the other are neither absolute necessaries, nor result from the habitual economy of life, but are the mere caprices of fancy, the evil is in its extreme; or if not,
The extremity of the evil must be in the case before us, where the absolute necessaries depend on the caprices of fancy and the caprice of a single fancy directs the fashion of the community. Here the dependence sinks to the lowest point of servility. We see a proof of it in the spirit of the address. Twenty thousand persons are to get or go without their bread as a wanton youth may fancy to wear his shoes with or without straps, or to fasten his straps with strings or with buckles. Can any despotism be more cruel than a situation in which the existence of thousands depends on one will, and that will on the most slight and fickle of all motives, a mere whim of the imagination."
-- James Madison; "Fashion" National Gazette (March, 20, 1792) -
"Rub a dub dub thanks for the grub"
Bart Simpson-
"Chinga ching ching thanks for the bling."
- Dick Cheney -
"Yippie kie yay Harry Whittington!" -- Dick Cheney
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Har ha har har. Well slap my rifle and throw me another stint!
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"[E]ach generation should be made to bear the burden of its own wars, instead of carrying them on, at the expence of other generations... that each generation should not only bear its own burdens, but that the taxes composing them, should include a due proportion of such as by their direct operation keep the people awake, along with those, which being wrapped up in other payments, may leave them asleep, to misapplications of their money." -- James Madison, ('Universal Peace' from The National Gazette, February 2, 1792.)
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"If men were angels, no government would be necessary." -James Madison
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I don't know that such a quote does justice to the whole paragraph, which fleshes out the purpose and the mechanism for limited government:
"But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions." -- Federalist #51 -
It still captures most of the point. The rest is just an explanation on how this applies to a given situation (the newly formed US Republic.)
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"All natural institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit."
Thomas Paine ~ The Age of Reason -
"I have indeed two great measures at heart, without which no republic can maintain itself in strength: 1. That of general education, to enable every man to judge for himself what will secure or endanger his freedom. 2. To divide every county into hundreds, of such size that all the children of each will be within reach of a central school in it." --Thomas Jefferson to John Tyler, 1810. ME 12:393
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Figured may be we needed another left-esque quote popping in here right about now.
Perhaps next I should throw in one of Paine's later bits to add on to this? -
The Jeffersonians, despite their egalitarian spirit, were pragmatic enough (probably due to the failure of radical liberalism in france--which they chalked up to a lack enlightened understanding on the part of the "degraded masses") to realize that a republic (democracy) needed to be a noocracy of the people
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"England exhibits the most remarkable phaenomenon in the universe in the contrast between the profligacy of it’s government and the probity of it’s citizens... I hope we shall take warning from the example and crush in it’s birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country." -- Thomas Jefferson, letter to George Logan (Nov. 16, 1916)
oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=808&ch... -
"we both consider the people as our children, and love them with parental affection. But you love them as infants whom you are afraid to trust without nurses; and I as adults whom I freely leave to self-government." -- Thomas Jefferson (to P. S. Dupont De Nemours, April 24, 1816)
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He who goes a borrowing goes a sorrowing- Benjamin Franklin
Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition. - Thomas Jefferson-
I don't really follow Jefferson's agrarian ideals, as they are not entirely practicable in our modern age. Here is the context for above quote:
"Those who labor the earth, are the chosen people of God, if ever He had a chosen people, whose breasts He has made His peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which He keeps alive that sacred fire which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth. Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example. It is the mark set on those who, not looking up to heaven, to their own soil and industry, as does the husbandman, for their subsistence, depend for it on the casualties and caprice of customers. Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition. This, the natural progress and consequence of the arts, has sometimes, perhaps, been retarded by accidental circumstances; but generally speaking, the proportion which the aggregate of the other classes of citizens bears in any State to that of its husbandmen is the proportion of its unsound to its healthy parts, and is a good enough barometer whereby to measure its degree of corruption." (Notes on Virginia, 1782. ME 2:229) -
Interesting... I haven't seen this one before.
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"Those who labor the earth, are the chosen people of God..." I thought farming was inflicted as a punishment? (Genesis 3)
In any case, I very much disagree with a lot of that message, especially the idea that an agrarian life breeds independence (personally I think any correlation is just independence breeding desire for a less-restrained, legalized and socially pressured rural life, in other words, being independent makes you want to farm, not the other way around), although certainly encouraging greater independence, maybe through reworking personal protection laws (see "Death Wish"), the attitude towards government, business and land, and reigning in the growth of government and corporate welfare, is not only right but necessary if we wish to keep our nation alive both at heart and in external strength.
I would especially point to rural China to highlight my point about very controlled, tyrannical rural societies with NO self-reliance. -
you've got to understand the time and place. A freeholder was seen as being much preferrable to Hamilton's ideal of the default position for human beings to be that of wage slave. Probably the modern equivelent would be that of a small business owner. Someone who answers to other's when it is profitable to do so, not because one has to. I can't think of a much more complete model of SELF-GOVERNANCE than that.
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point
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perhaps, JJ, you would relate better to Thomas Paine, as he dabbled in engineering:
oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=1083&c...
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"All these Godless savages. Kill them, kill them all!"
Anonymous.-
Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey (9 September 1513)?
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low blow?
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Fortunately the Scots were "confined" to a reservation called Scotland which is all that "we" ever wanted.
"The Hills are bare now,
And Autumn leaves
Lie thick and still,
O'er land that is lost now,
Which those so dearly held"
www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2R1TMNxPj8&feature=related
Yes we really are that ugly.
Perhaps we Scots have a singular connection with all the indigenous peoples of the world. One would like to think so. -
I suggested a reservation for the scots irish in another thread.... tongue and cheek tho
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"After the colonies revolted against Great Britain and established the United States of America, the ideology of Manifest destiny became integral to the American nationalist movement."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Americans_in_the_United_States -
most immigrants came here to escape oppression elsewhere. most didn't understand any such notion but that of survival. as far as those notions of our founding intelligentsia, most beleived that indigenious individuals would be better off for having gained liberal government, individuality, and--in the case of some--secularism. For those, their notions on the subject were not so much different from their aspirations for the indigenious european. Judge them if you like.
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' The creation of crimes after the commission of the fact, or, in other words, the subjecting of men to punishment for things which, when they were done, were breaches of no law, and the practice of arbitrary imprisonments, have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny. The observations of the judicious Blackstone,1 in reference to the latter, are well worthy of recital: "To bereave a man of life, [says he] or by violence to confiscate his estate, without accusation or trial, would be so gross and notorious an act of despotism, as must at once convey the alarm of tyranny throughout the whole nation; but confinement of the person, by secretly hurrying him to jail, where his sufferings are unknown or forgotten, is a less public, a less striking, and therefore a more dangerous engine of arbitrary government." And as a remedy for this fatal evil he is everywhere peculiarly emphatical in his encomiums on the habeas corpus act '
-- Alexander Hamilton, Federalist #84
and this was before one was apt to be thrown on a C130 bound for Syria at the whim of a rogue Vice President.-
I don't recall you using this quote when Obama's admin decided to pursue the CIA interrogators...
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If I recall that was pursuing INVESTIGATION into whether anything illegal at the time had been done. Fear not though, it seems all such whimsy has been swept under the rug
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"Too many of these stock-jobbers and king-jobbers have come into our legislature, or rather too many of our legislature have become stock-jobbers and king-jobbers."
-- Jefferson; letter to Marquis de Lafayette, (16 Jun 1792) -
"The extremity of the evil must be in the case before us, where the absolute necessaries depend on the caprices of fancy and the caprice of a single fancy directs the fashion of the community. Here the dependence sinks to the lowest point of servility. We see a proof of it in the spirit of the address. Twenty thousand persons are to get or go without their bread as a wanton youth may fancy to wear his shoes with or without straps, or to fasten his straps with strings or with buckles. Can any despotism be more cruel than a situation in which the existence of thousands depends on one will, and that will on the most slight and fickle of all motives, a mere whim of the imagination."
-- James Madison, 'Fashion' National Gazette, 1792 -
"Cruelty to brute animals is another means of destroying moral sensibility. The ferocity of savages has been ascribed in part to their peculiar mode of subsistence. Mr. Hogarth points out, in his ingenious prints, the connection between cruelty to brute animals in youth, and murder in manhood.…I am so perfectly satisfied of the truth of a connection between morals and humanity to brutes, that I shall find it difficult to restrain my idolatry for that legislature, that shall first establish a system of laws, to defend them from outrage and oppression."
-- Benjamin Rush; from 'An inquiry into the influence of physical causes upon the moral faculty' -
"...the chief object of this progressive tax (besides the justice of rendering taxes more equal than they are) is, as already stated, to extirpate the overgrown influence arising from the unnatural law of primogeniture ...it will appear that after an estate exceeds thirteen or fourteen thousand a year, the remainder produces but little profit to the holder, and consequently, Will pass either to the younger children, or to other kindred."
-- Thomas Paine; from 'Rights of Man, Part the Second' -
"No one man is capable, without the aid of society, of supplying his own wants, and those wants, acting upon every individual, impel the whole of them into society, as naturally as gravitation acts to a centre" -- Ibid
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