Popular misgovernment in the United StatesCruikshank, Alfred Byron
History
Popular misgovernment in the United States
Cruikshank, Alfred Byron
Suffrage -- United States; United States -- Politics and government
Not only property but the honest and intelligent desire for property
should be represented in the councils of the State. This aspiration has
been stigmatized by twaddlers as an “appetite”; but an appetite is a
good thing; and essential to life. The desire for wealth is one of
nature’s constructive forces and should be availed of by wise statesmen
for the purpose of nation building. Nothing is more offensive to the
intelligent thinking man than to hear hypocritical demagogic ranters
denounce as “greed” the honest efforts of thrift to collect together a
competence for old age, a provision for helpless children, or capital
for a business enterprise. Politicians and the impudent followers of
politicians, vile parasites on the body politic, scurvy knaves who have
never earned an honest hundred dollars in their lives, make a trade of
this kind of talk; preferring the business of flattering and cozening a
constituency of wooden heads and uncontrolled emotions to earning a
living honestly. The wish for property is a primal impulse like the love
of life, the appetite for food and drink, and the desire for
procreation; it is in the nature of every healthy man; the want of it is
abnormal and detracts from capacity for constructive state work. Those
who really lack it become in politics as dangerous as lunatics; they are
dreamers, enthusiasts who ruin everything they control, such as were
Robespierre and thousands of his followers. One would not trust one of
these crackbrains to build a house, let alone a nation. In private life
they are shiftless and burdensome on their friends and the public; in
the lower classes they are often known as loafers or deadbeats; some of
them become the “floaters” of politics, the cheap material for bandit
political organizations. On the other hand this desire to create, to
save, to preserve and to perpetuate useful and beautiful things, is a
natural force which wise statesmen employ to the utmost in the service
of the State; whose development they encourage in civics, in private
life, in politics and in government, and which found in the character of
the individual should be accorded its proper and legitimate, sane and
steadying influence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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