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    &Democracies

    Republics

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    Robert Welch founded The John BirchSociety in 1958 and led it until just prior tohis death in 1985. This essay was firstdelivered as a speech at the Constitution Dayluncheon of We, The People in Chicago, onSeptember 17, 1961. The principles heespoused in that speech are timeless. The

    American Republic will endure only so longas those principles are sufficientlyunderstood by each succeeding generation of

    Americans.

    Republics and

    DemocraciesBy Robert Welch

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    Without the proper foundation,Liberty will crumble!

    The first scene in this drama, on which thecurtain clearly lifts, is Greece of the SixthCentury B.C. The city of Athens was havingso much strife and turmoil, primarily as

    between its various classes, that the wisestcitizens felt something of a morepermanent nature, rather than just atemporary remedy, had to be developed --to make possible that stability, internalpeace, and prosperity which they hadalready come to expect of life in a civilizedsociety. And through one of those fortunateaccidents of history, which surprise us onone side by their rarity and on the otherside by ever having happened at all, thesecitizens of Athens chose an alreadydistinguished fellow citizen, named Solon,to resolve the problem for both theirpresent and their future. They saw thatSolon was given full power over everyaspect of government and of economic lifein Athens. And Solon, applying himself tothe specific job, time, and circumstances,and perhaps without any surmise that hemight be laboring for lands and centuries

    other than his own, proceeded to establishin "the laws of Solon" what amounted to,so far as we know, the first writtenregulations whereby men ever proposed togovern themselves. Undoubtedly evenSolon's decisions and his laws were butprojections and syntheses of theories andpractices which had already been inexistence for a long time. And yet hiselection as Archon of Athens, in 594 B.C.,

    can justly be considered as the date of awhole new approach to man's eternalproblem of government.

    There is no question but that the laws andprinciples which Solon laid down bothforeshadowed and prepared the way for allrepublics of later ages, including our own.

    He introduced, into the visible record ofman's efforts and progress, the veryprinciple of "government by written andpermanent law" instead of "governmentby incalculable and changeabledecrees" (Will Durant). And he himselfset forth one of the soundest axioms of

    all times, that it was a well-governedstate "when the people obey the rulersand the riders obey the laws." Thisconcept, that there were laws which evenkings and dictators must observe, wasnot only new; I think it can be correctlydescribed as "western."

    Here was a sharp and important cleavageat the very beginning of our western

    civilization, from the basic concept thatalways had prevailed in Asia, whichconcept still prevailed in Solon's day, andwhich in fact remained unquestioned inthe Asiatic mind and empires until longafter the fall of the Roman Empire of theEast, when Solon had been dead twothousand years.

    The Tyrants of Democracy

    Unfortunately, while Solon's lawsremained in effect in Athens in varyingdegrees of theory and practice for fivecenturies, neither Athens nor any of theGreek city-states ever achieved the formof a republic, primarily for two reasons.First, Solon introduced the permanentlegal basis for a republican government,but not the framework for itsestablishment and continuation. The

    execution, observance, and perpetuationof Solon's laws fell naturally and almostautomatically into the hands of tyrants,who ruled Athens for long but uncertainperiods of time, through changing formsand administrative procedures for theirrespective governments. And second, theGreek temperament was too volatile, the

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    whole principle of self-government wastoo exciting -- even through a dictatorwho might have to be overthrown byforce -- for the Athenians ever to finishthe job Solon had begun, and bindthemselves as well as their rulers downto the chains of an unchanging

    constitution. Even the authority ofSolon's laws had to be enforced and thusestablished by successive tyrants likePisistratus and Cleisthenes, or theymight never have amounted to anythingmore than a passing dream. The idealwas there, of rule according to writtenlaws; that those laws were at times andto some extent honored or observedconstituted one huge step towards -- and

    fulfilled one prerequisite of -- a truerepublic.

    But the second great step, of agovernment framework as fixed andpermanent as the basic laws weresupposed to be, remained for theRomans and other heirs of Greece toachieve. As a consequence Athens -- andthe other Greek city-states whichemulated it -- remained politically asdemocracies, and eventually learnedfrom their own experiences that it wasprobably the worst of all forms ofgovernment.

    But out of the democracies of Greece, astempered somewhat by the laws ofSolon, there came as a direct spiritualdescendant the first true republic theworld has ever known. This was Rome in

    its earlier centuries, after the monarchyhad been replaced. The period is usuallygiven as from 509 B.C. to 49 B.C., Romehaving got rid of its kings by the first ofthose dates, and having turned to theCaesars by the second. But the reallyimportant early date is 454 B.C., whenthe Roman Senate sent a commission to

    Greece to study and report on thelegislation of Solon. The commission,consisting of three men, did its workwell. On its return the Roman Assemblychose ten men -- and hence called theDecemviri -- to rule with supreme powerwhile formulating a new code of laws for

    Rome. And in 454 B.C. they proposed,and the Assembly adopted, what werecalled The Twelve Tables. This code,based on Solon's laws, became thewritten constitution of the RomanRepublic.

    The Twelve Tables, "amended andsupplemented again and again -- bylegislation, praetorial edicts, senatus

    consulta, and imperial decrees --remained for nine hundred years thebasic law of Rome" (Durant). At least intheory, and always to some extent inpractice, even after Julius Caesar hadfounded the empire which wasrecognized as an empire from the time ofAugustus. What was equally important,even before the adoption of The TwelveTables, Rome had already established theframework, with firm periodicity for itspublic servants, of a republic in whichthose laws could be, and for a whilewould be, impartially and faithfullyadministered.

    For, as a Roman named Gaius (andotherwise unknown) was to write inabout 160 A.D., "all law pertains topersons, to property, and to procedure."And for a satisfactory government you

    need as much concern about theimplementation of those laws, thegovernmental agencies through whichthey are to be administered, and thewhole political framework within whichthose laws form the basis of order and ofjustice, as with the laws themselveswhich constitute the original statute

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    books. And the Romans contrived and --subject to the exceptions and changesinflicted on the pattern by the ambitionsand cantankerous restlessness of humannature -- maintained such a frameworkin actual practice for nearly five hundredyears.

    The Romans themselves referred to theirgovernment as having a "mixedconstitution." By this they meant that ithad some of the elements of ademocracy, some of the elements of anoligarchy, and some of those of anautocracy; but they also meant that theinterest of all the various classes ofRoman society were taken into

    consideration by the Romanconstitutional government, rather thanjust the interests of some one class.Already the Romans were familiar withgovernments which had been foundedby, and were responsible to, one classalone: especially "democracies," as ofAthens, which at times considered therights of the proletariat as supreme; andoligarchies, as of Sparta, which wereequally biased in favor of the aristocrats.Here again the Roman instinct andexperience had led them to one of thefundamental requisites of a true republic.

    Checks and Balances

    In summary, the Romans were opposedto tyranny in any form; and the feature ofgovernment to which they gave the mostthought was an elaborate system of

    checks and balances. In the earlycenturies of their republic, wheneverthey added to the total offices andofficeholders, as often as not they weremerely increasing the diffusion of powerand trying to forestall the potentialtyranny of one set of governmentalagents by the guardianship or watchdog

    powers of another group. When theTribunes were set up; for instance,around 350 B.C., their express purposeand duty was to protect the people ofRome against their own government.This was very much as our Bill of Rightswas designed by our Founding Fathers

    for exactly the same purpose. And otherchanges in the Roman government hadsimilar aims. The result was a civilizationand a government which, by the timeCarthage was destroyed, had become thewonder of the world, and whichremained so in memory until theNineteenth Century -- when its gloriesbegan receding in the minds of men,because [it was] surpassed by those of

    the rising American Republic.

    Now it should bring more than smiles, infact it should bring some very seriousreflections, to Americans, to realize whatthe most informed and penetratingRomans, of all eras, thought of their earlyrepublic.

    It is both interesting, and significantlyrevealing, to find exactly the samearguments going on during the firstcenturies B.C. and A.D. about the sourcesof Roman greatness, that swirl around ustoday with regard to the United States.Cicero spoke of their "mixedconstitution" as "the best form ofgovernment." Polybius, in the secondcentury, B.C., had spoken of it in exactlythe same terms; and, going further, hadascribed Rome's greatness and triumphs

    to its form of government. Livy, however,during the days of Augustus, wrote of thevirtues that had made Rome great, beforethe Romans had reached the evils of histime, when, as he put it, "we can bearneither our diseases nor their remedies."And those virtues were, he said, "theunity and holiness of family life, the

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    pietas (or reverential attitude) ofchildren, the sacred relation of men withthe gods at every step, the sanctity of thesolemnly pledged word, the stoic self-control and gravitas (or serious sense ofresponsibility)." Doesn't that soundfamiliar?

    But while many Romans gave full creditto both the Roman character and theirearly environment, exactly as we do withregard to American greatness today, thenature and excellence of their earlygovernment, and its contribution to thebuilding of Roman greatness, werewidely discussed and thoroughlyrecognized. And the ablest among them

    knew exactly what they were talkingabout. "Democracy," wrote Seneca, "ismore cruel than wars or tyrants.""Without checks and balances," Dr. WillDurant summarizes one statement ofCicero, "monarchy becomes despotism,aristocracy becomes oligarchy,democracy becomes mob rule, chaos, anddictatorship." And he quotes Ciceroverbatim about the man usually chosenas leader by an ungoverned populace, as"someone bold and unscrupulous ... whocurries favor with the people by givingthem other men's property" (ouremphasis).

    If that is not an exact description of theleaders of the New Deal, the Fair Deal,and the New Frontier, I don't knowwhere you will find one. What Cicero wasbemoaning was the same breakdown of

    the republic, and of its protection againstsuch demagoguery and increasing"democracy," as we have beenexperiencing. This breakdown was underexactly the same kind of pressures thathave been converting the AmericanRepublic into a democracy, the onlydifference being that in Rome those

    pressures were not so conspiratoriallywell organized as they are in Americatoday. Virgil, and many great Romanslike him were, as Will Durant says, wellaware that "class war, not Caesar, killedthe Roman Republic." In about 50 B.C.,for instance, Sallust had been charging

    the Roman Senate with placing propertyrights above human rights (ouremphasis). And we are certain that ifFranklin D. Roosevelt had ever heard ofSallust or read one of Sallust's speeches,he would have told somebody to go outand hire this man Sallust for one of hisghostwriters at once.

    About thirty years ago a man named

    Harry Atwood, who was one of the firstto see clearly what was being done by thedemagogues to our form of government,and the tragic significance of the change,wrote a book entitled Back To TheRepublic. It was an excellent book,except for one shortcoming. Mr. Atwoodinsisted emphatically, over and over, thatours was the first republic in history; thatAmerican greatness was due to ourFounding Fathers having given ussomething entirely new in history, thefirst republic -- which Mr. Atwooddescribed as the "standard government,"or "the golden mean," towards which allother governments to the right or the leftshould gravitate in the future. Now thetruth is that, by merely substituting thename Rome for the name United States,and making similar changes innomenclature, Mr. Atwood's book could

    have been written by Virgil or by Seneca,with regard to the conversion of theRoman Republic into a democracy. It isonly to the extent we are willing to learnfrom history that we are able to avoidrepeating its horrible mistakes. Andwhile Mr. Atwood did not sufficientlyrealize this fact, fortunately our

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    Founding Fathers did. For they were menwho knew history well and weredetermined to profit by that knowledge.

    Antonyms, Not Synonyms

    Also, by the time of the American

    Revolution and Constitution, themeanings of the words "republic" and"democracy" had been well establishedand were readily understood. And mostof this accepted meaning derived fromthe Roman and Greek experiences. Thetwo words are not, as most of today'sLiberals would have you believe -- and asmost of them probably believethemselves -- parallels in etymology, or

    history, or meaning. The wordDemocracy (in a political rather than asocial sense, of course) had alwaysreferred to a type of government, asdistinguished from monarchy, orautocracy, or oligarchy, or principate.The word Republic, before 1789, haddesignated the quality and nature of agovernment, rather than its structure.When Tacitus complained that "it iseasier for a republican form ofgovernment to be applauded thanrealized," he was living in an empireunder the Caesars and knew it. But hewas bemoaning the loss of thatadherence to the laws and to theprotections of the constitution whichmade the nation no longer a republic;and not to the fact that it was headed byan emperor.

    The word democracy comes from theGreek and means, literally, governmentby the people. The word "republic" comesfrom the Latin, res publica, and meansliterally "the public affairs." The word"commonwealth," as once widely used,and as still used in the official title of mystate, "the Commonwealth of

    Massachusetts," is almost an exacttranslation and continuation of theoriginal meaning of res publica. And itwas only in this sense that the Greeks,such as Plato, used the term that hasbeen translated as "republic." Plato waswriting about an imaginary

    "commonwealth"; and while he certainlyhad strong ideas about the kind ofgovernment this Utopia should have,those ideas were not conveyed norforeshadowed by his title.

    The historical development of themeaning of the word republic might besummarized as follows. The Greekslearned that, as Dr. Durant puts it, "man

    became free when he recognized that hewas subject to law." The Romans appliedthe formerly general term "republic"specifically to that system of governmentin which both the people and their rulerswere subject to law. That meaning wasrecognized throughout all later history,as when the term was applied, howeverinappropriately in fact and optimisticallyin self-deception, to the "Republic ofVenice" or to the "Dutch Republic." Themeaning was thoroughly understood byour Founding Fathers. As early as 1775John Adams had pointed out thatAristotle (representing Greek thought),Livy (whom he chose to representRoman thought), and Harington (aBritish statesman), all "define a republicto be -- a government of laws and not ofmen." And it was with this fullunderstanding that our constitution-

    makers proceeded to establish agovernment which, by its very structure,would require that both the people andtheir rulers obey certain basic laws --laws which could not be changed withoutlaborious and deliberate changes in thevery structure of that government. Whenour Founding Fathers established a

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    "republic," in the hope, as BenjaminFranklin said, that we could keep it, andwhen they guaranteed to every statewithin that "republic" a "republicanform" of government, they well knew thesignificance of the terms they were using.And were doing all in their power to

    make the feature of government signifiedby those terms as permanent as possible.They also knew very well indeed themeaning of the word democracy, and thehistory of democracies; and they weredeliberately doing everything in theirpower to avoid for their own times, andto prevent for the future, the evils of ademocracy.

    Let's look at some of the things they saidto support and clarify this purpose. OnMay 31, 1787, Edmund Randolph told hisfellow members of the newly assembledConstitutional Convention that the objectfor which the delegates had met was "toprovide a cure for the evils under whichthe United States labored; that in tracingthese evils to their origin every man hadfound it in the turbulence and trials ofdemocracy...."

    The Founders Knew the Difference

    The delegates to the Convention wereclearly in accord with this statement. Atabout the same time another delegate,Elbridge Gerry, said: "The evils weexperience flow from the excess ofdemocracy. The people do not want (thatis, do not lack) virtue; but are the dupes

    of pretended patriots." And on June 21,1788, Alexander Hamilton made aspeech in which he stated:

    It had been observed that a puredemocracy if it were practicable would bethe most perfect government. Experiencehas proved that no position is more false

    than this. The ancient democracies inwhich the people themselves deliberatednever possessed one good feature ofgovernment. Their very character wastyranny; their figure deformity.

    Another time Hamilton said: "We are a

    Republican Government. Real liberty isnever found in despotism or in theextremes of Democracy." Samuel Adamswarned: "Remember, Democracy neverlasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts andmurders itself! There never was ademocracy that 'did not commit suicide.'"

    James Madison, one of the members ofthe Convention who was charged with

    drawing up our Constitution, wrote asfollows:...democracies have ever been

    spectacles of turbulence and contention;have ever been found incompatible withpersonal security, or the rights ofproperty; and have in general been asshort in their lives as they have beenviolent in their deaths.

    "What have yougiven us, Mister Franklin?""A republic, ma'm,if you can keep it."Benjamin Franklin

    Madison and Hamilton and Jay and theircompatriots of the Convention preparedand adopted a Constitution in which theynowhere even mentioned the worddemocracy, not because they were not

    familiar with such a form of government,but because they were. The worddemocracy had not occurred in theDeclaration of Independence, and doesnot appear in the constitution of a singleone of our fifty states -- whichconstitutions are derived mainly from thethinking of the Founding Fathers of the

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    Republic -- for the same reason. Theyknew all about Democracies, and if theyhad wanted one for themselves and theirposterity, they would have founded one.Look at all the elaborate system of checksand balances which they established; atthe carefully worked-out protective

    clauses of the Constitution itself, andespecially of the first ten amendmentsknown as the Bill of Rights; at the effort,as Jefferson put it, to "bind men downfrom mischief by the chains of theConstitution," and thus to solidify therule not of men but of laws. All of thesesteps were taken, deliberately, to avoidand to prevent a Democracy, or any ofthe worst features of a Democracy, in the

    United States.

    "...bind men down from mischiefwith the chains of the Constitution."Thomas Jefferson

    And so our Republic was started its way.And for well over a hundred years ourpoliticians, statesmen, and peopleremembered that this was a republic, nota democracy, and knew what they meantwhen they made that distinction. Again,let's look briefly at some of the evidence.

    Washington, in his first inauguraladdress, dedicated himself to "thepreservation ... of the republican modelof government." Thomas Jefferson, ourthird president, was the founder of theDemocratic Party; but in his firstinaugural address, although he referred

    several times to the Republic or therepublican form of government he didnot use the word "democracy" a singletime. And John Marshall, who was ChiefJustice of the Supreme Court from 1801to 1835, said: "Between a balancedrepublic and a democracy, the differenceis like that between order and chaos."

    Throughout the Nineteenth Century andthe early part of the Twentieth, whileAmerica as a republic was growing greatand becoming the envy of the wholeworld, there were plenty of wise men,both in our country and outside of it,

    who pointed to the advantages of arepublic, which we were enjoying, andwarned against the horrors of ademocracy, into which we might fall.Around the middle of that century,Herbert Spencer, the great Englishphilosopher, wrote, in an article on TheAmericans: "The Republican form ofgovernment is the highest form ofgovernment; but because of this it

    requires the highest type of humannature -- a type nowhere at presentexisting." And in truth we have not beena high enough type to preserve therepublic we then had, which is exactlywhat he was prophesying.

    Thomas Babington Macaulay said: "Ihave long been convinced thatinstitutions purely democratic must,sooner or later, destroy liberty orcivilization, or both." And we certainlyseem to be in a fair way today to fulfill hisdire prophecy. Nor was Macaulay'scontention a mere personal opinionwithout intellectual roots and substancein the thought of his times. Nearly twocenturies before, Dryden had alreadylamented that "no government had everbeen, or ever can be, wherein timeserversand blockheads will not be uppermost."

    And as a result, he had spoken of nationsbeing "drawn to the dregs of ademocracy." While in 1795 ImmanuelKant had written: "Democracy isnecessarily despotism."

    In 1850 Benjamin Disraeli, worried aswas Herbert Spencer at what was already

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    being foreshadowed in England, made aspeech to the British House of Commonsin which he said: "If you establish ademocracy, you must in due time reapthe fruits of a democracy. You will in dueseason have great impatience of publicburdens, combined in due season with

    great increase of public expenditure. Youwill in due season have wars entered intofrom passion and not from reason; andyou will in due season submit to peaceignominiously sought and ignominiouslyobtained, which will diminish yourauthority and perhaps endanger yourindependence. You will in due seasonfind your property is less valuable, andyour freedom less complete." Disraeli

    could have made that speech with evenmore appropriateness before a jointsession of the United States Congress in1935. In 1870 he had already come upwith an epigram which is strikingly truefor the United States today. "The world isweary," he said, "of statesmen whomdemocracy has degraded intopoliticians."

    But even in Disraeli's day there weresimilarly prophetic voices on this side ofthe Atlantic. In our own country JamesRussell Lowell showed that herecognized the danger of unlimitedmajority rule by writing:

    Democracy gives every manThe right to be his own oppressor.

    W.H. Seward pointed out that

    "Democracies are prone to war, and warconsumes them." This is an observationcertainly borne out during the past fiftyyears exactly to the extent that we havebeen becoming a democracy and fightingwars, with each trend as both a cause andan effect of the other one. And RalphWaldo Emerson issued a most prophetic

    warning when he said: "Democracybecomes a government of bulliestempered by editors." If Emerson couldhave looked ahead to the time when somany of the editors would themselves bea part of, or sympathetic to, the gang ofbullies, as they are today, he would have

    been even more disturbed. And in the1880's Governor Seymour of New Yorksaid that the merit of our Constitutionwas, not that it promotes democracy, butchecks it.

    "Real liberty is never found in despotismor the extremes of democracy."Alexander Hamilton

    Across the Atlantic again, a little later,Oscar Wilde once contributed thisepigram to the discussion: "Democracymeans simply the bludgeoning of thepeople, by the people, for the people."While on this side, and after the firstWorld War had made the degenerativetrend in our government so visible to anypenetrating observer, H.L. Menckenwrote: "The most popular man under ademocracy is not the most democraticman, but the most despotic man. Thecommon folk delight in the exactions ofsuch a man. They like him to boss them.Their natural gait is the goosestep."While Ludwig Lewisohn observed:"Democracy, which began by liberatingmen politically, has developed adangerous tendency to enslave himthrough the tyranny of majorities and thedeadly power of their opinion."

    "Democracies have ever beenspectacles of turbulence.... "James Madison

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    The Prerequisite for Revolution

    But it was a great Englishman, G.K.Chesterton, who put his finger on thebasic reasoning behind all the continuedand determined efforts of theCommunists to convert our republic into

    a democracy. "You can never have arevolution," he said, "in order toestablish a democracy. You must have ademocracy in order to have a revolution."

    And in 1931 the Duke ofNorthumberland, in his booklet, TheHistory of World Revolution, stated:"The adoption of Democracy as a form ofGovernment by all European nations is

    fatal to good Government, to liberty, tolaw and order, to respect for authority,and to religion, and must eventuallyproduce a state of chaos from which anew world tyranny will arise." While aneven more recent analyst, Archibald E.Stevenson, summarized the situation asfollows: "De Tocqueville once warnedus," he wrote, "that: 'If ever the freeinstitutions of America are destroyed,that event will arise from the unlimitedtyranny of the majority.' But a majoritywill never be permitted to exercise such'unlimited tyranny' so long as we cling tothe American ideals of republican libertyand turn a deaf ear to the siren voicesnow calling us to democracy. This is not aquestion relating to the form ofgovernment. That can always be changedby constitutional amendment. It is oneaffecting the underlying philosophy of

    our system -- a philosophy whichbrought new dignity to the individual,more safety for minorities and greaterjustice in the administration ofgovernment. We are in grave danger ofdissipating this splendid heritagethrough mistaking it for democracy."

    And there have been plenty of othervoices to warn us.

    So -- how did it happen that we havebeen allowing this gradual destruction ofour inheritance to take place? And whendid it start? The two questions are closely

    related.

    For not only every democracy, butcertainly every republic, bears withinitself the seeds of its own destruction.The difference is that for a soundlyconceived and solidly endowed republicit takes a great deal longer for thoseseeds to germinate and the plants togrow. The American Republic was bound

    -- is still bound -- to follow in thecenturies to come the same course todestruction as did Rome. But our realground of complaint is that we have beenpushed down the demagogic road todisaster by conspiratorial hands, farsooner and far faster than would havebeen the results of natural politicalevolution.

    These conspiratorial hands first gotseriously to work in this country in theearliest years of the Twentieth Century.The Fabian philosophy and strategy wasimported to America from England, as ithad been earlier to England fromGermany. Some of the members of theIntercollegiate Socialist Society, foundedin 1905, and some of the members of theLeague for Industrial Democracy intowhich it grew, were already a part of, or

    affiliated with, an internationalCommunist conspiracy, planning tomake the United States a portion of aone-world Communist state. Others sawit as possible and desirable merely tomake the United States a separatesocialist Utopia. But they all knew andagreed that to do either they would have

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    to destroy both the constitutionalsafeguards and the underlyingphilosophy which made it a republic. So,from the very beginning the whole driveto convert our republic into a democracywas in two parts. One part was to makeour people come to believe that we had,

    and were supposed to have, a democracy.The second part was actually andinsidiously to be changing the republicinto a democracy.

    The first appreciable and effectiveprogress in both directions began withthe election of Woodrow Wilson. OfWilson it could accurately have beensaid, as Tacitus had said of some Roman

    counterpart: "By common consent, hewould have been deemed capable ofgoverning had he never governed." Sincehe did become President of the UnitedStates for two terms, however, it is hardto tell how much of the tragic disaster ofthose years was due to the conscioussupport by Wilson himself of Communistpurposes, and how much to his beingmerely a dupe and a tool of ColonelEdward Mandell House. But at any rate itis under Wilson that, for the first time,we see the power of the Americanpresidency being used to supportCommunist schemers and Communistschemes in other countries -- asespecially, for instance, in Mexico, andthroughout Latin America.

    It was under Wilson, of course, that thefirst huge parts of the Marxian program,

    such as the progressive income tax, wereincorporated into the American system.It was under Wilson that the first hugelegislative steps to break down what theRomans would have called "our mixedconstitution" of a republic, and convert itinto the homogenous jelly of ademocracy, got under way with such

    measures as the direct election ofSenators. And it was under Wilson thatthe first great propaganda slogan wascoined and emblazoned everywhere, tomake Americans start thinking favorablyof democracies and forget that we had arepublic. This was, of course, the slogan

    of the first World War: "To make theworld safe for democracy." If enoughAmericans had, by those years,remembered enough of their ownhistory, they would have been worryingabout how to make the world safe fromdemocracy. But the great deception andthe great conspiracy were already wellunder way.

    New Deal or Double Dealing?

    The conspirators had to proceed slowlyand patiently, nevertheless, and to havetheir allies and dupes do the same. For inthe first place the American people couldnot have been swept too fast and too farin this movement without enough alarmsbeing sounded to be heard and heeded.And in the second place, after theexcitement of World War I had sunk intothe past, and America was returning towhat Harding called "normalcy," therewas a strong revulsion against the wholebinge of demagoguery and crackpotidealism which had been created underWoodrow Wilson, and which had beenused to give us this initial push on theroad towards ultimate disaster. Andduring this period from 1920 until theso-called great depression could be

    deliberately accentuated, extended, andincreased to suit the purposes of theFabian conspirators, there was simply agermination period for the seeds ofdestruction which the conspirators hadplanted. Not until Franklin D. Rooseveltcame to power in 1933 did the wholeCommunist-propelled and Communist-

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    managed drive again begin to take visibleand tangible and positive steps in theirprogram to make the United Statesultimately succumb to a one-worldCommunist tyranny. Most conservativeAmericans are today well aware of manyof those steps and of their significance;

    but there are still not enough who realizehow important to Communist plans wasthe two-pronged drive to convert theAmerican republic into a democracy andto make the American people accept thechange without even knowing there hadbeen one. From 1933 on, however, thatdrive and that change moved into highgear, and have been kept there eversince.

    Let's look briefly at just two importantand specific pieces of tangible evidence ofthis drive, and of its success in even thoseearly years.

    In 1928 the U.S. Army Training Manual,used for all of our men in army uniform,gave them the following quite accuratedefinition of a democracy: "Agovernment of the masses. Authorityderived through mass meeting or anyform of 'direct' expression. Results inmobocracy. Attitude toward property iscommunistic -- negating property rights.Attitude toward law is that the will of themajority shall regulate, whether it bebased upon deliberation or governed bypassion, prejudice, and impulse, withoutrestraint or regard to consequences.Results in demagogism, license,

    agitation, discontent, anarchy."

    That was in 1928. Just when that trueexplanation was dropped, and throughwhat intermediate changes the definitionwent, I have not had sufficient time andopportunity to learn. But compare that1928 statement with what was said in the

    same place for the same use by 1952. InThe Soldiers Guide, Department of theArmy Field Manual, issued in June of1952, we find the following:

    Meaning of democracy. Because theUnited States is a democracy, the

    majority of the people decide how ourgovernment will be organized and run --and that includes the Army, Navy, andAir Force. The people do this by electingrepresentatives, and these men andwomen then carry out the wishes of thepeople (emphasis mine).

    Now obviously this change from basictruth to superficial demagoguery, in the

    one medium for mass indoctrination ofour youth which has been available to theFederal Government until such time as itachieves control over public education,did not just happen by accident. It waspart of an over-all design, which becameboth extensive in its reach and rapid inits execution from 1933 on. Let's look atanother, less important but equallystriking, illustration.

    Former Governor Lehman of New York,in his first inaugural message in 1933,did not once use the word democracy.The poison had not yet reached into thereservoirs from which flowed his politicalthoughts. In his inaugural message of1935 he used the word "democracy"twice. The poison was beginning to work.In his similar message of 1939 he usedthe word "democracy," or a derivative

    thereof, twenty-five times. And less thana year later, on January 3, 1940, in hisannual message to the New Yorklegislature, he used it thirty-three times.The poison was now permeating everystream of his political philosophy.

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    Spreading the Big Lie

    By today that same poison has beendiffused, in an effective dosage, throughalmost the whole body of Americanthought about government. Newspaperswrite ringing editorials declaring that

    this is and always was a democracy. Inpamphlets and books and speeches, inclassrooms and pulpits and over the air,we are besieged with the shouts of theLiberals and their political henchmen, allpointing with pride to our being ademocracy. Many of them even believe it.Here we have a clear-cut sample of theBig Lie which has been repeated so oftenand so long that it is increasingly

    accepted as truth. And never was a BigLie spread more deliberately for moresubversive purposes. What is even worse,because of their unceasing efforts todestroy the safeguards, traditions, andpolicies which made us a republic, andpartly because of this very propaganda ofdeception, what they have been shoutingso long is gradually becoming truth.Despite Mr. Warren and his SupremeCourt and all of their allies, dupes, andbosses, we are not yet a democracy. Butthe fingers in the dike are rapidlybecoming fewer and less effective. And agreat many of the pillars of our republichave already been washed away.

    Since 1912 we have seen the impositionof a graduated income tax, as alreadymentioned. Also, the direct election ofSenators. We have seen the Federal

    Reserve System established and thenbecome the means of giving our centralgovernment absolute power over credit,interest rates, and the quantity and valueof our money; and we have seen theFederal Government increasingly usethis means and this power to take moneyfrom the pockets of the thrifty and put it

    in the hands of the thriftless, to expandbureaucracy, increase its huge debts anddeficits, and to promote socialisticpurposes of every kind.

    We have seen the Federal Governmentincrease its holdings of land by tens of

    millions of acres, and go into business, asa substitute for and in competition withprivate industry, to the extent that inmany fields it is now the largest -- and inevery case the most inefficient --producer of goods and services in thenation. And we have seen it carry thesocialistic control of agriculture to suchextremes that the once vauntedindependence of our farmers is now a

    vanished dream. We have seen a centralgovernment taking more and morecontrol over public education, overcommunications, over transportation,over every detail of our daily lives.

    We have seen a central governmentpromote the power of labor-unionbosses, and in turn be supported by thatpower, until it has become entirely toomuch a government of and for one class,which is exactly what our FoundingFathers wanted most to prevent.We have seen the firm periodicity of thetenure of public office terrificallyweakened by the four terms as Presidentof Franklin D. Roosevelt, somethingwhich would justly have horrified andterrified the founders of our republic. Itwas the fact that, in Greece, the chiefexecutive officers stayed in power for

    long periods, which did much to preventthe Greeks from ever achieving arepublic. In Rome it was the rise of thesame tendency, under Marius and Sullaand Pompey, and as finally carried to itslogical state of life-rule under JuliusCaesar, which at last destroyed therepublic even though its forms were left.

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    And that is precisely one reason why theCommunists and so many of their Liberaldupes wanted third and fourth terms forFDR. They knew they were thus helpingto destroy the American Republic.

    We have seen both the Executive

    Department and the Supreme Courtoverride and break down the clearlyestablished rights of the states and stategovernments, of municipal governments,and of so many of those diffusers ofpower so carefully protected by theConstitution. Imagine, for instance, whatJames Madison would have thought ofthe Federal Government telling the cityof Newburgh, New York, that it had no

    control over the abuse by the shiftless ofits welfare handouts.

    We have seen an utterly unbelievableincrease in government by appointiveofficials and bureaucratic agencies -- adevelopment entirely contrary to the veryconcept of government expounded andmaterialized by our Constitution. And wehave seen the effective checking andbalancing of one department of ourgovernment by another departmentalmost completely disappear.

    Destroying Our Republic

    James Madison, in trying to give us arepublic instead of a democracy, wrotethat "the accumulation of all powers,legislative, executive, and judicial, in thesame hands, whether of one, a few, or

    many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly bedenounced as the very definition oftyranny." The whole problem for theLiberal Establishment that runs ourgovernment today, and has been runningit for many years regardless of the labelsworn by successive administrations, has

    not been any divergence of beliefs or ofpurposes between the controllingelements of our executive, legislative orjudicial branches. For twenty years,despite the heroic efforts of men like Taftto stop the trend, these branches havebeen acting increasingly in complete

    accord, and obviously according todesigns laid down for them by theschemers and plotters behind the scenes.And their only question has been as tohow fast the whole tribe dared to go inadvancing the grand design. We do notyet have a democracy simply because ittakes a lot of time and infinite pressuresto sweep the American people all of theway into so disastrous an abandonment

    of their governmental heritage.

    In the Constitution of the AmericanRepublic there was a deliberate and veryextensive and emphatic division ofgovernmental power for the very purposeof preventing unbridled majority rule. Inour Constitution governmental power isdivided among three separate branchesof the national government, threeseparate branches of State governments,and the peoples of the several States. Andthe governmental power, which is sodivided, is sometimes exclusive,sometimes concurrent, sometimeslimited, at all times specific, andsometimes reserved. Ours was truly, andpurposely, a "mixed constitution."

    In a democracy there is a centralizationof governmental power in a simple

    majority. And that, visibly, is the systemof government which the enemies of ourrepublic are seeking to impose on ustoday. Nor are we "drifting" into thatsystem, as Harry Atwood said in 1933,and as many would still have us believe.We are being insidiously,conspiratorially, and treasonously led by

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    deception, by bribery, by coercion, andby fear, to destroy a republic that was theenvy and model for all of the civilizedworld.

    Finally, let's look briefly at two or threeimportant characteristics of our republic,

    and of our lives under the republic,which were unique in all history up to thepresent time.

    First, our republic has offered thegreatest opportunity and encouragementto social democracy the world has everknown. Just as the Greeks found thatobedience to law made them free, soAmericans found that social democracy

    flourished best in the absence of politicaldemocracy. And for sound reasons. Forthe safeguards to person and propertyafforded by a republic, the stableframework which it supplied for life andlabor at all levels, and the resultingconstant flux of individuals from oneclass into another, made caste impossibleand snobbery a joke.

    In the best days of our republicAmericans were fiercely proud of the factthat rich and poor met on such equalterms in so many ways, and without theslightest trace of hostility. The wholethought expressed by Burns in hisfamous line, "a man's a man for a' that,"has never been accepted moreunquestioningly, nor lived up to moretruly, than in America in those wonderfuldecades before the intellectual snobs and

    power-drunk bureaucrats of our recentyears set out to make everybodytheoretically equal (except to themselves)by legislation and coercion. And I can tellyou this. When you begin to find thatJew and Gentile, White and Colored, richand poor, scholar and laborer, aregenuinely and almost universally friendly

    to one another again -- instead of goingthrough all the silly motions of a phonyequality forced upon them by increasingpolitical democracy -- you can be surethat we have already made great stridesin the restoration of our once gloriousrepublic.

    And for a very last thought, let me pointout what seems to me to be somethingabout the underlying principles of theAmerican Republic which really was newin the whole philosophy of government.In man's earlier history, and especially inthe Asiatic civilizations, all authorityrested in the king or the conqueror byvirtue of sheer military power. The

    subjects of the king had absolutely norights except those given them by theking. And such laws or constitutionalprovisions as did grow up wereconcessions wrested from the king orgiven by him out of his own supposedlyultimate authority. In more modernEuropean states, where the completemilitary subjugation of one nation byanother was not so normal, that ultimateauthority of the ruler came to rest on thetheory of the divine right of kings, or insome instances and to some extent onpower specifically bestowed on rulers bya pope as the representative of divinity.

    In the meantime the truly westerncurrent of thought, which had begun inGreece, was recurrently, intermittently,and haltingly gaining strength. It wasthat the people of any nation owed their

    rights to the government which theythemselves had established and whichowed its power ultimately to theirconsent. Just what rights any individualcitizen had was properly determined bythe government which all of the citizenshad established, and those rights weresubject to a great deal of variations in

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    different times and places underdifferent regimes. In other words, therights of individuals were still changeablerights, derived from government, eventhough the power and authority andrights of the government werethemselves derived from the total body of

    the people.

    The Key Word is "Unalienable"

    Then both of these basic theories ofgovernment, the eastern and the western,were really amended for all time bycertain principles enunciated in theAmerican Declaration of Independence.Those principles became a part of the

    very foundation of our republic. And theysaid that man has certain unalienablerights which do not derive fromgovernment at all. Under this theory notonly the Sovereign Conqueror, but theSovereign People, are restricted in theirpower and authority by man's naturalrights, or by the divine rights of theindividual man. And those certainunalienable and divine rights cannot beabrogated by the vote of a majority anymore than they can by the decree of aconqueror. The idea that the vote of apeople, no matter how nearlyunanimous, makes or creates ordetermines what is right or just, becomesas absurd and unacceptable as the ideathat right and justice are simply whatevera king says they are. Just as the earlyGreeks learned to try to have their rulersand themselves abide by the laws they

    had themselves established, go man hasnow been painfully learning that thereare more permanent and lasting lawswhich cannot be changed by eithersovereign kings or sovereign people, butwhich must be observed by both. Andthat government is merely a convenience,superimposed on Divine

    Commandments and on the natural lawsthat flow only from the Creator of manand man's universe.

    Now that principle seems to me to be themost important addition to the theory ofgovernment in all history. And it has, as I

    said, at least tacitly been recognized as afoundation stone and cardinal tenet ofthe American Republic. But of course anysuch idea that there are unchangeablelimitations on the power of the peoplethemselves is utterly foreign to thetheory of a democracy, and even moreimpossible in the practices of one. Andthis principle may ultimately be by farthe most significant of all the many

    differences between a republic and ademocracy. For in time, under anygovernment, without that principleslavery is inevitable, while with it slaveryis impossible. And the AmericanRepublic has been the first great exampleof that principle at work.


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