Democracy Threatens the Republic

 

A believer in Roman virtue, John Adams wrote that “the word democracy signifies nothing more nor less than a nation of people without any government at all, and before any constitution is instituted.” He believed that Roman virtue will save republics through a balanced constitution, or at least postpone decay, but “as soon as the Roman senate was destroyed and the government came into the people’s hands, no man lived safe but the triumvirs and their tools.”  The American founders’ established a republic, not a democracy.

Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman

North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission

"Unsurpassed Valor, Courage and Devotion to Liberty"

www.ncwbts150.com

"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"

Democracy Threatens the Republic

“When travelers write books they are justified in describing what they have seen and need not rise to generalization.  Nevertheless, no department of travel literature is richer in social and philosophic generalizations than is that written by European travelers visiting the United States, especially before 1870, as they struggle to understand the republican experiment.

An examination of these accounts written between 1777 and 1842 . . . reveals the eagerness of authors to predict the future success or failure of the radical republic.  The authors of the more notorious titles in this library . . . complain of vulgarity, lawlessness, mobs, vanity, the love of money-getting, lack of cultivation, and provincialism, qualities they invariably impute to the social and political experimentation of the United States.

The form of the American government may be republican, said [Captain] Basil Hall, but American life is democratic, and democracy has “a direct tendency to lower the standard of talents, of knowledge, and of public spirit, besides putting public virtue in great danger.”

“Democracy,” he wrote, “when once let loose, is exactly like any other inundation – it is sure to find its level, -- and whatever it cannot reach, it undermines and finally subverts.”

Captain Marryat was even more emphatic:

“A democratic form of government is productive of . . . demoralizing effects. Its rewards are few.  Honours of every description, which stir up the soul of man to noble deeds – worthy incitements, they have none. The only compensation they can offer for services is money; and the only distinction – the only means of raising himself above his fellows left to the American – is wealth; consequently, the acquisition of wealth has become the great spring of action.”

The American government has degenerated since the days of Washington and must do so “because “as men increase and multiply so do they deteriorate; the closer they are packed the more vicious they become.”

[To discourage dangerous democratic impulses, Benjamin Rush stated that] “While we inculcate . . . republican duties upon our pupils, we must not neglect, at the same time, to inspire him with republican principles.  He must be taught that there can be no durable liberty but in a republic, and that government, like all other sciences, is of a progressive nature.  While philosophy has protected us by its discoveries from a thousand natural evils, government has unhappily not followed with an equal pace . . . our business is to make them men, citizens and Christians . . . Above all, let our youth be instructed in the history of the ancient republics, and the progress of liberty and tyranny in the different states of Europe.”

(O Strange New World, Howard Mumford Jones, The Viking Press, 1964, pp. 308-309, 343)