Last Best Hope of Earth

Author: Last Best Hope of Earth

  • The Revolution: Cato’s Thoughts on a Question Proposed to the Public (Part II)

    Pamphlet by “Cato”: Thoughts on a Question of Importance Proposed to the Public, Whether it is probable that the Immense Extent of Territory acquired by this Nation at the late Peace, will operate towards the Prosperity, or the Ruin of the Island of Great-Britain?

    London, 1765.

    Part I here.

    When a nation has “Elegance and Luxury” introduced to its people, “it must be Manufacture and Commerce only, which can make a People numerous and prosperous.” So wrote Cato, and he continued by noting that when a nation has a more expansive territory, there is “less Necessity either of Manufactures or Commerce” as the “Multitude of common People, by whose Hands National Industry must be carried on, can easily find Support without them.” But, what if, as was the case with the British Empire, the territories become so far spread? Cato doubted that the same rules applied to such a situation; he predicted that manufacture and commerce were indeed still necessary for making the common people “numerous and prosperous.” And he made that prediction based on three reasons.

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  • Constitution Sunday: Major Martin Kingsley on the Excessive Powers of Congress

    Massachusetts Ratifying Convention

    January 21, 1788

    A representative democracy requires that elected officials are servants to the people. There must be accountability, and with two-year terms for members of the House of Representatives, four-year terms for Presidents, and six-year terms for Senators, the Constitution has provided voters with the option to rotate their servants every two years. For Major Martin Kingsley, at the Massachusetts Ratifying Convention, the Constitution was inferior to the Articles of Confederation because there was insufficient checks on public servants.

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  • The Revolution: Cato’s Thoughts on a Question Proposed to the Public (Part I)

    Pamphlet by “Cato”: Thoughts on a Question of Importance Proposed to the Public, Whether it is probable that the Immense Extent of Territory acquired by this Nation at the late Peace, will operate towards the Prosperity, or the Ruin of the Island of Great-Britain?

    London, 1765.

    At the end of the Seven Years War, known to Americans as the French and Indian War, a peace came to be that included Great Britain adding more territory to its empire. That territory, located in the New World, brought the British Empire to effectively control North America, and while that was widely viewed as a net positive, questions were emerging about what the empire would do with its burgeoning colonies; colonies which may have been bringing income and commodities to Great Britain itself but also colonies that were becoming more difficult to maintain. To the author known as “Cato,” these developments did not bode well: he urged the British government to use the “quiet Interval, such as you now enjoy,” and while it “is very rare in Countries where there is so much Liberty as we have at present; neither can it be expected to last long.”

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  • Constitution Sunday: A Sharp Exchange at the Massachusetts Convention

    Massachusetts Ratifying Convention

    January 17, 1788

    For those debating the Constitution’s ratification, no detail of the draft document was forgotten. To detractors, like the Honorable Mr. Turner who rose on January 17, 1788 at the Massachusetts Ratifying Convention, there were hidden dangers throughout the document. One that he raised was that Congress “may alter the place for chusing representatives in the general Congress.” Turner, before the Convention, said to look to abuses of power: if members of Congress wished to help themselves, as people in power often do, then this is one way in which they may do so; they could alter the place to be inaccessible for three-fourths of the population. “The great law of self preservation will prevail,” Turner said, and it didn’t stop there. There were forces at work in the country that were changing the country and its people: “paper money, and the practice of privateering, have produced a gradual decay of morals—introduced pride—ambition—envy—lust of power—produced a decay of patriotism, and the love of commutative justice.” By giving this Constitution and the members of Congress this power, the Convention was creating the chance for abuse, and where that risk can be prevented, it should, so Turner reasoned.

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  • The Election of 1884

    The Election of 1884

    The Democratic Party was in turmoil. Its candidates were not winning, and many of its ideas had fallen out of favor. It was a long way from the days of the Party’s founding: Andrew Jackson and his disciple, Martin Van Buren, held power for the twelve years spanning 1829 to 1841 and—into the 1840s and 1850s—James Polk, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan continued to lead the Party into the White House albeit against candidates from the newly-formed and then soon-to-be-disbanded Whig Party. Then, following the emergence of the Republican Party—an emergence which culminated in its candidate, Abraham Lincoln, prevailing in the elections of 1860 and 1864—Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s Vice President and then successor as President, oversaw a one-term presidency which came to an end in 1869. Johnson, partly because he was serving between two titans of the century (Lincoln and Civil War hero Ulysses S. Grant), was always going to struggle to earn admiration but, unlike Lincoln and Grant, Johnson was technically a Democrat, and perhaps because he was so thoroughly shamed for his actions as President, the Party would scarcely recognize him as a member. Whether a result of Johnson’s malfeasance or not, following Johnson’s presidency came an era of Republican dominance: Republican Grant won two consecutive terms, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes secured a succeeding term, Republican James Garfield then was victorious, and following his assassination, Republican Chester Arthur served out the remainder of that term. That brought the parties and the country to 1884. As the election of 1884 approached, it had been decades since a strong, effective Democrat—a Democrat who embodied the Party’s principles and would be a standard bearer for the Party, unlike the postbellum Democratic President, Johnson, or the last antebellum one, Buchanan—held office, and for Democrats to win this election, it would take someone special; someone who would be transformative even if only in a way that was possible at the time. As fortune would have it, it could not be a wartime presidency or a presidency that birthed fundamental change in American government, but that was because the circumstances of the era did not call for such a President; it could, however, be a presidency that tackled one of the biggest issues of the time: corruption.

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  • Constitution Sunday: Fisher Ames on Biennial Elections and on the Volcano of Democracy

    Massachusetts Ratifying Convention.

    January 15, 1788

    The duration of a term for a member of the House of Representatives was a contentious issue: while some favored one-year terms, others—such as Fisher Ames—advocated for two-year terms. To Ames, a member of the House would be unlikely to learn enough about the country in a year to cast informed votes and to represent the interests of the people. Adding to that was the fact that the country was set to grow: Ames expressed his hope that the country would be home to “fifty millions of happy people” and that a member of the House would require at “least two years in office” to enable that member “to judge of the trade and interests of states which he never saw.” But, also at issue was the expression and suppression of the will of the people through their representatives.

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  • Constitution Sunday: Governor Samuel Huntington on the Need for Coercive National Power

    Connecticut Ratifying Convention.

    January 9, 1788

    When Connecticut’s Governor, Samuel Huntington, rose to speak at the state’s ratifying convention, he rose to second a motion by General Parsons to “assent to, ratify, and adopt the Constitution,” but in seconding the motion, Governor Huntington provided perspective and context for why he was asking the state’s delegates to ratify. To the Governor, the debate and potential ratification of the Constitution was “a new event in the history of mankind.—Heretofore, most governments have been formed by tyrants, and imposed on mankind by force.” This Constitution was being considered during a “time of peace and tranquility” and, “with calm deliberation,” the representatives were framing a novel system of government that accounted for the pitfalls that other governments had not avoided.

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  • Constitution Sunday: Oliver Ellsworth defends the Taxing Power and Comments on Dual Sovereignties and Judicial Review

    Connecticut Ratifying Convention

    January 7, 1788

    When the Connecticut Ratifying Convention assembled, there were objections against the draft Constitution on the basis that it was “despotic” in its bestowing great power upon Congress: to the objectors, Congress having both the power of the purse and the power of the sword was intolerable. Oliver Ellsworth, however, defended the Constitution as written. Ellsworth, who would later become a United States Senator and a Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, had seen the ineffectiveness of those United States as existed under the Articles of Confederation and thus saw the draft Constitution as remedying the defects that caused that ineffectiveness.

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  • Constitution Sunday: James Wilson’s Summation and Final Rebuttal

    Constitution Sunday: James Wilson’s Summation and Final Rebuttal

    Pennsylvania Ratifying Convention.

    December 11, 1787

    Before concluding the Pennsylvania Ratifying Convention, James Wilson delivered a closing argument for ratifying the draft Constitution and took on many of his adversaries’ best arguments while presenting the most compelling reasons for adopting the Constitution. To detractors of the Constitution, a most glaring flaw in the document was its creation of a relatively powerful federal government as compared to that existing under the Articles of Confederation. Some called for scrapping the draft Constitution and simply enlarging the powers of the present federal government to make it more effective yet still modest.

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  • A Fee-Based Government

    A Fee-Based Government

    Rutherford B. Hayes, from the moment that he “won” the Election of 1876, had many opponents. And, because he believed that having opponents meant you must be doing something right, he relished the fight with his opposition. One issue that Hayes prioritized was reforming the fee-based governance system, the system that empowered government officials to use “fees, bounties, subsidies, and contracts with private individuals or corporations to enforce laws and implement public policy.”[i] With the federal government having significantly grown from the antebellum era, those officials had accrued and would continue to accrue power in novel ways. Reforming that system—if, in fact, Hayes sought to do that—would not be something he could have hoped to do during his time as President.

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