Posted on 06/03/2007 3:08:24 PM PDT by kiriath_jearim
[I reproduce an excerpt from Tocqueville's "Democracy In America" (first volume published in 1835). The 2004 translation is by Arthur Goldhammer and available currently via Library Of America]
"Although America does not yet have a great capital, it already has some very large cities. In 1830 the population of Philadelphia was 161,000 and that of New York 202,000. The lower classes in these vast cities constitute a rabble even more dangerous than that of Europe. It consists primarily of freed Negroes condemned by law and opinion to a state of hereditary degradation and misery. In its midst one also finds hordes of Europeans driven to the shores of the New World every day by misfortune and mischief. These people bring our worst vices with them to the United States, and they have none of the interests that could combat the influence of those vices. As residents of the country but not citizens, they are quick to take advantage of all the passions simmering within it. There have recently been serious riots in Philadelphia and New York, for example. Such disorders are unknown in the rest of the country, which is not alarmed by them because to date the urban population has no power or influence over the rural population."
"I, however, look upon the size of certain American cities, and even more the composition of their population, as a veritable danger that threatens the future of the democratic republics of the New World, and I do not hesitate to predict that this is how they will perish, unless their governments succeed in creating an armed force obedient to the will of the national majority yet independent of the urban populace and capable of putting down its excesses."
Urbanites become largely dependent on the municipal services etc. That pushes them toward socialism.
Where is Captain Obvious when you need him?
An astute student of history and human nature, one Thomas Jefferson, predicted all this after witnessing the run up to the FIRST socialist/communist revolution in France while ambassador there. He penned the following observations concerning what would happen HERE should that socialism come to the United States. He CORRECTLY predicted that we would become an increasingly contentious and litigious people as we shouldered one another out of the way to get OURS from the public trough and the trough would soon be empty.
He also knew where the bulk of the problem would originate.
That whirring noise you may hear coming from that mountain in Charlottesville, Virginia is Mr. Jefferson getting up to around 3600 RPM.
“The mobs of the great cities add just so much to the support of pure government as sores do to the strength of the human body. It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigor. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution.” —Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Virginia Q.XIX, 1782. ME 2:230
I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries as long as they are chiefly agricultural; and this will be as long as there shall be vacant lands in any part of America. When they get piled upon one another in large cities as in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe.” —Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1787. Papers 12:442
“I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man. True, they nourish some of the elegant arts; but the useful ones can thrive elsewhere; and less perfection in the others, with more health, virtue and freedom, would be my choice.” —Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Rush, 1800. ME 10:173
“Our cities... exhibit specimens of London only; our country is a different nation.” —Thomas Jefferson to Andre de Daschkoff, 1809. ME 12:304
“Everyone, by his property or by his satisfactory situation, is interested in the support of law and order. And such men may safely and advantageously reserve to themselves a wholesome control over their public affairs and a degree of freedom which, in the hands of the canaille of the cities of Europe, would be instantly perverted to the demolition and destruction of everything public and private.” —Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 1813. ME 13:401
“An insurrection... of science, talents, and courage, against rank and birth... has failed in its first effort, because the mobs of the cities, the instrument used for its accomplishment, debased by ignorance, poverty, and vice, could not be restrained to rational action. But the world will recover from the panic of this first catastrophe.” —Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 1813. ME 13:402
“I fear nothing for our liberty from the assaults of force; but I have seen and felt much, and fear more from English books, English prejudices, English manners, and the apes, the dupes, and designs among our professional crafts. When I look around me for security against these seductions, I find it in the wide spread of our agricultural citizens, in their unsophisticated minds, their independence and their power, if called on, to crush the Humists of our cities, and to maintain the principles which severed us from England.” —Thomas Jefferson to Horatio G. Spafford, 1814. ME 14:120
Yes urbanites are dependent but I’m afraid rural people are also. I live in the well populated countryside of southwest Washington state. We have some commercial dairies, fryer and layer operations, small cattle farms, haying, very few grain or cornfields. There are plenty of fertile river valleys. What you don’t see are people raising their own subsistence gardens for beans and berries and corn, or raising chickens or pigs for their own use. With Social Security, even those that know how to do it don’t bother anymore. And the Indian casinos are taking the excess not needed for subsistence.
Jefferson was brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.
Where are those great minds today? We have supposedly made great strides on all fronts, but we seemingly have no great minds like the Founders. Instead, we have the ‘founderers’, those who seek to profit from the vast public trough at the expense of the great nation that was concieved from those men who were giants.
Maybe those minds still exist today, but can no longer gain any traction amidst the grafters we have today. “What’s in it for me?” is the refrain amongst the power brokers in the hallowed halls.
It is quite possible that Reagan was our last great leader; our last great mind to rise to power. If so, we are on the final slide to obscurity, the last ride into the ash heap of history.
Which is why I have a large portrait of Mr. Jefferson over my fireplace here — a few feet from my bust of Beethoven (who also detested these elitist morons of the sort we seem to have in charge today).
A number of years ago, my wife and I toured Monticello. I asked her to go on ahead down the mountain to the car as I stood at the iron fence encircling the small graveyard where he is buried and, gazing at the simple marker over his resting place, I wept!
“Yes, we did produce a near-perfect republic but will they keep it? Or will they, in the enjoyment of plenty, lose the memory of freedom? Material abundance without character is the path to destruction.”
Thomas Jefferson
We are nearing the end of that path.
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