I pray you are right.
And I would prefer death before prison.
God bless you my friend. And may He bless the United States
Like you said, it’s in our hearts.
And may God bless you too, FRiend!
This is not to say we should not fight to the last. I just believe that in the big picture, our future will likely resemble more the Alamo than the Battle of Midway.
Republican Virtue
The Creation of the American Republic | 1969 | Gordon S. Wood
Posted on Sunday, June 03, 2012 8:32:34 AM by Jacquerie
Perhaps everyone in the eighteenth century could have agreed that in theory no State was more beautiful than a republic, whose whole object by definition was the good of the people. Yet everyone knew it was a fragile beauty indeed. It was axiomatic that no society could hold together without the obedience of its members to the legally constituted authority. In a monarchy the complicated texture of the society, “the magnificence, costly equipage and dazzling splendors” lavished on the prince, the “multitude of criminal laws, with severe penalties, the very rigor of the unitary authority often with the aid of a standing and an established religious hierarchy, all worked to maintain public order; an order derived only from the passion of fear.
But in a republic which possessed none of this complicated social texture, where the elected rulers were merely the servants of the public, and where the people themselves shared in a large measure of the governing - in such a State, order, if there was to be any, must come from below.
The very greatness of republicanism, its utter dependence on the people, was simultaneously its source of weakness. In a republic there was no place for fear, there could be no sustained coercion from above. The State, like no other, rested on the consent of the governed freely given and not compelled. In a free government the laws, as the American clergy never tired of repeating, had to be obeyed by the people for conscience’s sake, not for wraths’s.
In a republic, each man must somehow be persuaded to submerge his personal wants into the greater good of the whole. This was termed “public virtue.” A republic was such a delicate polity precisely because it demanded an extraordinary moral character in the people. Every state in which the people participated needed a degree of virtue; but a republic which rested solely on the people absolutely required it.
Although a particular structural arrangement of the government in a republic might temper the necessity for public virtue, ultimately no model of government whatever can equal the importance of this principle, nor afford proper safety and security without it. Without some portion of this generous principle, anarchy and confusion would immediately ensue, the jarring interests of individuals, regarding themselves only, and indifferent to the welfare of others . . . would end in ruin and subversion of the State.
The eighteenth century mind was thoroughly convinced that a popularly based government cannot be supported without virtue. Only with a public-spirited, self sacrificing people could the authority of a popularly elected government be obeyed, but more by the virtue of the people, than by the terror of punishment. Because virtue was truly the lifeblood of the republic, the thoughts and hopes surrounding this concept of public spirit gave the American Revolution its socially radical character.