BOLSHEVIK INHUMANITY

A number of historians have rightly emphasised the point that the February revolution in 1917 did not provoke a counter-revolution. The overthrow of the Tsarist regime prompted a wide variety of reactions among the former ruling class: a resignation to events, a bitterness at the incompetence and obstinacy of the imperial court, yet also an initial optimism among its more liberal and idealistic members. Most of the nobility and bourgeoisie supported the Provisional Government in the hope that it would at least restrain the worst excesses and keep the country together. The initial absence of any attempt to fight back illustrated not so much apathy, as the feeling that there was little of the ancien regime left that was worth defending.

A determination to resist only began to develop during the summer, when the Bolshevik programme polarised opinion. The question is important when it comes to the origins of the civil war itself, which led to the deaths of up to 12 million people, the utter impoverishment of the whole country and suffering on an unimaginable scale. Konstantin Paustovsky lamented the lost opportunity for democratic change. ‘The idyllic aspect of the first days of the Revolution was disappearing. Whole worlds were shaking and falling to the ground. Most of the intelligentsia lost its head, that great humanist Russian intelligentsia which had been the child of Pushkin and Herzen, of Tolstoy and Chekhov.

It had known how to create high spiritual values, but with only a few exceptions it proved helpless at creating the organisation of a state.’ Spiritual values never stood a chance against a fanatical determination to destroy all those of the past, both good and bad. No country can escape the ghosts of its past, least of all Russia. The writer and critic Viktor Shklovsky compared the Bolsheviks to the devil’s apprentice who, in an old Russian folk tale, boasted that he knew how to rejuvenate an old man. To restore his youth, he first needed to burn him up. So, the apprentice set him on fire, but then found that he could not revive him.

Fratricidal wars are bound to be cruel because of their lack of definable front lines, because of their instant extension into civilian life, and because of the terrible hatreds and suspicions suspicions which they engender. The fighting right across the Eurasian land-mass was violent beyond belief, especially the unspeakable cruelty of Cossack atamans in Siberia. Even that arch-conservative politician V.V. Shulgin believed that one of the major reasons for the failure of the Whites was a ‘moral collapse’—that they behaved as badly as their Bolshevik enemy. There was, nevertheless, one subtle yet important difference. All too often Whites represented the worst examples of humanity. For ruthless inhumanity, however, the Bolsheviks were unbeatable.

Antony Beevor, Russia (501-502). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

THE MEMORY HOLE

As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he clipped his speakwritten corrections to the appropriate copy of the Times and pushed them into the pneumatic tube. Then, with a movement which was as nearly as possible unconscious, he crumpled up the original message and any notes that he himself had made, and dropped them into the memory hole to be devoured by the flames. What happened in the unseen labyrinth to which the pneumatic tubes led, he did not know in detail, but he did know in general terms. As soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of the Times had been assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its stead. 

This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound tracks, cartoons, photographs—to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance. Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. 

All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place. The largest section of the Records Department, far larger than the one on which Winston worked, consisted simply of persons whose duty it was to track down and collect all copies of books, newspapers, and other documents which had been superseded and were due for destruction. A number of the Times which might, because of changes in political alignment, or mistaken prophecies uttered by Big Brother, have been rewritten a dozen times still stood on the files bearing its original date, and no other copy existed to contradict it. 

Books, also, were recalled and rewritten again and again, and were invariably reissued without any admission that any alteration had been made. Even the written instructions which Winston received, and which he invariably got rid of as soon as he had dealt with them, never stated or implied that an act of forgery was to be committed; always the reference was to slips, errors, misprints, or misquotations which it was necessary to put right in the interests of accuracy. But actually, he thought as he readjusted the Ministry of Plenty's figures, it was not even forgery. It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. 

Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connection with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connection that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. A great deal of the time you were expected to make them up out of your head.

George Orwell, 1984 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition.

SOFT BIGOTRY

You might expect policymakers to be scrambling to shore up academic standards. In fact, they are doing the opposite.

The Economist
March 18, 2024
Soft bigotry
New numbers show falling standards in American high schools
Low-achieving pupils may suffer the most

SPRINGFIELD, in MASSACHUSETTS, might seem an improbable setting for an education miracle. The city with a population of 155,000 along the Connecticut river has a median household income half the state average; violent crime is common. Yet graduation rates at the city’s high schools are surging. Between 2007 and 2022 the share of pupils at the Springfield High School of Science and Technology who earned a diploma in four years jumped from 50% to 94%; at neighbouring Roger Putnam Vocational Technical Academy it nearly doubled to 96%.

Alas, such gains are not showing up in other academic indicators. At Springfield High scores on the SAT, a college-admissions test, have tumbled by 15% over the same period. Measures of English and maths proficiency are down, too. The pass rate on advanced-placement exams has fallen to just 12% compared with a national average of 60%.

The trend at Springfield High is all too common. Between 2007 and 2020 the average graduation rate at public high schools in America leapt from 74% to 87%. During this period pupils notched up gains in course credits and grade-point averages. Yet SAT scores fell (see chart 1). Results from the latest Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), an international test of 15-year-olds, show that maths and reading literacy are flat or down. An analysis by The Economist suggests that schools are lowering academic standards in order to enable more pupils to graduate. And the trend is hurting low-performing pupils the most.

America has fretted about academic standards at its public schools for decades. In 1983 the Department of Education released a landmark report, “A Nation At Risk,” which warned of a “rising tide of mediocrity” in the country’s schools. The response was swift. Within five years 45 states had raised graduation requirements; and more than two dozen had introduced other reforms, including more comprehensive curriculums and higher salaries for teachers. Some states also started requiring graduates to pass “minimum-competency” exams, standardised tests introduced in the 1970s that evaluated pupils’ ability to do eighth- or ninth-grade level English and maths.

But as graduation requirements were toughened up, coursework was watered down. A survey conducted in 1996 by Public Agenda, a policy research group, found that just half of public high-school students felt that they were being challenged academically. Another survey in 2001 found that only a quarter of pupils thoughßt that their teachers had high expectations of them. Even the federal government acknowledged again that academic standards were falling short. A report by the Department of Education found that more than a tenth of maths coursework taken by the class of 2005 consisted of primary- and middle-school-level material. Only a third of algebra 1 students and a fifth of geometry students received “rigorous” instruction.

Grading got easier, too. The best evidence for this comes from comparisons of classroom grades with performance on state exams taken at the end of the school year. A study by Seth Gershenson of American University found that between 2005 and 2016, 36% of North Carolina public-school students who received Bs in their algebra 1 courses failed their end-of-course exams. Pupils with Cs failed 71% of the time. Another study, by Chris Clark of Georgia College & State University, analysed maths courses at Georgia public high schools in 2007 and yielded similar results. “Some schools and school systems appear to be inflating course grades,” Mr Clark concluded, “while others appear to hold their students to higher standards.”
Such evidence suggests that academic standards at American high schools are too low. But are they getting worse? To answer this, The Economist assembled data on graduation rates and standardised test scores at 3,000 high schools across six states—Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan and North Carolina—for school years from 2007 to 2022.

Doing the maths

We found that four-year graduation rates in our sample increased during this period, even as test scores fell. Gains were greatest in high schools with the lowest test scores. In 2007 schools with scores on the sat or act, another college-admissions exam, in the bottom tenth of our sample graduated half of their pupils; in 2022 they graduated two-thirds. As low-performing schools have passed more pupils, the relationship between test scores and graduation rates has weakened (see chart 2).

Just how far has the academic bar been lowered? To quantify this, we conducted a regression analysis of graduation rates between 2007 and 2022 that controlled for average ACT or SAT scores, dropout rates and school year. If academic standards were consistent over time, we would expect no underlying trend in graduation rates from year to year. Instead, we found that graduation rates drifted upward, even after controlling for changes in test scores and dropout rates.

Our analysis suggests that high schools are graduating thousands of students who, not long ago, might not have made the grade. Some states have lowered the bar more than others. In Illinois graduation rates are about one percentage point higher than we would expect based on academic performance alone; in North Carolina they are nearly eight points higher. Overall, we found that public high schools in our sample are inflating graduation rates by roughly four percentage points compared with 15 years earlier.

Sceptics will point out that the test-taking population is significantly different today than it was 15 years ago, and that this may be making test scores look worse than they actually are. “If more and more students are sitting for these tests,” says Thomas Dee of Stanford University, “the composition changes over time in ways that probably bias scores downward.” Such “compositional effects” do not appear to explain our results, however. The share of students taking the ACT or SAT in our sample actually fell from 78% in 2007 to 68% in 2022. This would suggest that, if anything, our estimates of graduation-rate inflation may be too low, rather than too high.

You might expect policymakers to be scrambling to shore up academic standards. In fact, they are doing the opposite. In May last year New Jersey’s board of education voted to lower the passing score on the state’s high-school graduation test, saying the current standards had “adverse impacts” on students. In November Oregon education officials scrapped its “essential skills” graduation exams in maths, reading and writing. At least four more states—Florida, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York—are considering doing away with their own exit exams. In January Alaska’s board of education voted to lower proficiency standards for the state’s reading and maths exams.

The trend towards weakening standards can be blamed in part on No Child Left Behind, an education-reform law passed in 2002. It required states to track the share of students graduating in four years and set annual targets for improvement. Schools that failed to hit their targets faced sanctions, including possible closure. Although such policies were well-intentioned, they had perverse outcomes. To keep graduation rates up, teachers devised creative ways of raising grades: allowing students to retake exams, removing penalties for late assignments, adjusting grading scales. “We’re doing what I call ‘grading gymnastics’,” says Eric Welch, a social-studies teacher in Fairfax County, Virginia. “There’s a lot of pressure to hit the metric, regardless of how you do it,” explains Peter VanWylen, a data consultant and former teacher in Memphis, Tennessee. “Nobody wants to lose their job and so there’s this pressure to get the number where it needs to be.”

Other concerns are also at work. “The push for educational equity, and in particular racial equity, has been used in a lot of places to push against higher standards for high-school graduation,” says Morgan Polikoff of the University of Southern California. When New Jersey debated new testing benchmarks last year, one board-of-education member argued that a higher standard would be “unfair” to black and Latino students in urban districts. Oregon’s decision to drop its graduation exam in November was based in part on a report by the education department which concluded that the test produced “inequitable outcomes” for “historically marginalised” groups.

Must try harder

Lowering standards, it is thought, can help narrow such achievement gaps. Yet it may have the opposite effect. A recent working paper by Brooks Bowden, Viviana Rodriguez and Zach Weingarten of the Universities of Pennsylvania and Texas at San Antonio analyses how a more lenient grading policy introduced by North Carolina public high schools in 2014 affected effort and academic performance. The authors found that after schools implemented the new grading scale, which led to more As and fewer Fs, students with low test scores showed up to class less often and put in less effort. The attendance of high-scoring students did not change. Although the policy led to slightly higher graduation rates, it also contributed to wider gaps in GPAs and standardised test scores between high- and low-achieving students.

This suggests that policies that lower the bar may harm the very students they are meant to help. “I don’t think we’re helping anybody by handing out higher grades or giving out graduation certificates,” says Dr Bowden, one of the authors of the study. Better instead to set expectations high, reckons Dr Polikoff. “People rise to the expectations you set.” ■

ROUSSEAU

The antinomian temptation  

Translated into the political sphere, Rousseau’s ideas about freedom and virtue are a recipe for totalitarianism. “Those who dare to undertake the institution of a people,” Rousseau wrote in the Social Contract, “must feel themselves capable, as it were, of changing human nature, ... of altering the constitution of man for the purpose of strengthening it.” As the philosopher Roger Scruton observed in an essay on the French Revolution, “the revolutionary consciousness lives by abstract ideas, and regards people as the material upon which to conduct its intellectual experiments.” Man is “born free,” Rousseau famously wrote, but is “everywhere in chains.” Alas, most men did not, according to him, truly understand the nature or extent of their servitude. It was his job to enlighten them—to force them, as he put it in one chilling epithet, to be free. Such “freedom” is accomplished, Rousseau thought, by bringing individual wills into conformity with what he called the “general will”—surely one of the most tyrannical political principles ever enunciated. “If you would have the general will accomplished,” he wrote, “bring all the particular wills into conformity with it; in other words, as virtue is nothing more than this conformity of the particular wills, establish the reign of virtue.”

Establishing the reign of virtue is no easy task, as Rousseau’s avid disciple Maximilien Robespierre discovered to his chagrin. All those “particular wills”—i.e., individual men and women with their diverse aims and desires—are so recalcitrant and so ungrateful ungrateful for one’s efforts to make them virtuous. Still, one does what one can to convince them to conform. And the guillotine, of course, is a great expedient.

Robespierre was no political philosopher. But he understood the nature of Rousseau’s idea of virtue with startling clarity, as he showed when he spoke of “virtue and its emanation, terror.” It is a remark worthy of Lenin, and a grim foreshadowing of the Marxist-Leninist rhetoric that informed a great deal of Sixties radicalism. I mention Rousseau here because, acknowledged or not, he is an important intellectual and moral grandfather of so much that happened in the cultural revolution of the 1960S. (Important “fathers” include Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud.) Rousseau’s narcissism and megalomania, his paranoia, his fantastic political ideas and sense of absolute entitlement, his sentimentalizing nature-worship, even his twisted, hypertrophied eroticism: all reappeared updated in the tumult of the 1960s. And so did the underlying totalitarian impulse that informs Rousseau’s notion of freedom.


Roger Kimball, The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America (17-18). [2001] Encounter Books. Kindle Edition.

ON GUARD

‘You keep speaking, and I’ll stand guard.’ 

The Morning Dispatch
21 February 2024

Threats of political violence are more common than you think, old friend David French argued in the New York Times, but all hope is not lost. “The intimidation is systemic and ubiquitous, an acknowledged tactic in the playbook of the Trump right that flows all the way down from the violent fantasies of Donald Trump himself,” he wrote. “In the summer of 2021, I received a quite direct threat after I’d written a series of pieces opposing bans on teaching critical race theory in public schools. My wife and I knew that it was almost certainly a bluff. But we also knew that white nationalists had our home address, both of us were out of town and the only person home that night was my college-age son. 

So we called the local sheriff, shared the threat, and asked if the department could send someone to check our house. Minutes later, a young deputy called to tell me all was quiet at our home. When I asked if he would mind checking back frequently, he said he’d stay in front of our house all night. Then he asked, ‘Why did you get this threat?’ I hesitated before I told him. Our community is so MAGA that I had a pang of concern about his response. ‘I’m a columnist,’ I said, ‘and we’ve had lots of threats ever since I wrote against Donald Trump.’ 

The deputy paused for a moment. ‘I’m a vet,’ he said, ‘and I volunteered to serve because I believe in our Constitution. I believe in free speech.’ And then he said words I’ll never forget: ‘You keep speaking, and I’ll stand guard.’ I didn’t know that deputy’s politics and I didn’t need to. When I heard his words, I thought, that’s it. That’s the way through. Sometimes we are called to speak. Sometimes we are called to stand guard. All the time we can at least comfort those under threat, telling them with words and deeds that they are not alone. If we do that, we can persevere. Otherwise, the fear will be too much for good people to bear.”

KHMER ROUGE

Unlike Mao, whom he admired and followed in many respects, the leader of the Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot, did not waste time on “reeducation” but proceeded directly to the extermination of those categories of the population whom he suspected of actual or potential hostility to the new order: all civilian and military employees of the old regime, former landowners, teachers, merchants, Buddhist monks, and even skilled workers.

Richard Pipes, Communism
A Modern Library Chronicles Book
New York 2001, 132-135

        Just as the Holocaust expressed the quintessential nature of National Socialism, so did the Khmer Rouge rule in Cambodia (1975-1978) represent the purest embodiment of Communism: what it turns into when pushed to its logical conclusion. Its leaders would stop at nothing to attain their objective, which was to create the first truly egalitarian society in the world: to this end they were prepared to annihilate as many of their people as they deemed necessary. It was the most extreme manifestation of the hubris inherent in Communist ideology, the belief in the boundless power of an intellectual elite guided by the Marxist doctrine, with resort to unrestrained violence in order completely to reshape life. The result was devastation on an unimaginable scale.

        The leaders of the Khmer Rouge received their higher education in Paris, where they absorbed Rousseau’s vision of “natural man,” as well as the exhortations of Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre to violence in the struggle against colonialism. (“One must kill,” Sartre wrote. “To bring down a European is to…suppress at the same time the oppressor and the oppressed.”) On their return to Cambodia, they organized in the northeastern hills a tightly disciplined armed force made up largely of illiterate and semiliterate youths recruited from the poorest peasantry. These troops, for the most part twelve- to fourteen-year-old adolescents, were given intense indoctrination in hatred of all those different from themselves, especially city-dwellers and the Vietnamese minority. To develop a “love of killing and consequently war,” they were trained, like the Nazi SS, in tormenting and slaughtering animals.

        Their time came in early 1975, when the Khmer Rouge overthrew the government of Lon Nol, installed by the Americans, and occupied the country’s capital, Phnom Penh. The population at large had no inkling what lay in store, because in their propaganda the Khmer Rouge promised to pardon servants of the old regime, rallying all classes against the “imperialists” and landowners. Yet the instant Khmer Rouge troops entered Phnom Penh, they resorted to the most radical punitive measures. Convinced that cities were the nidus of all evil—in Fanon’s words, the home of “traitors and knaves”—the Khmer Rouge ordered the capital, with its 2.5 million inhabitants, and all other urban centers to be totally evacuated. The victims, driven into the countryside, were allowed to salvage only what they could carry on their backs. Within one week all Cambodian cities were emptied. Four million people, or 60 percent of the population, suffered exile, compelled to live under the most trying conditions, overworked as well as undernourished. Secondary and higher schools were shut down.

        Then the carnage began. Unlike Mao, whom he admired and followed in many respects, the leader of the Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot, did not waste time on “reeducation” but proceeded directly to the extermination of those categories of the population whom he suspected of actual or potential hostility to the new order: all civilian and military employees of the old regime, former landowners, teachers, merchants, Buddhist monks, and even skilled workers. Members of these groups, officially relegated to the lowest classes of citizens and deprived of all rights, including access to food rations, were either summarily shot or sent to perform forced labor until they dropped dead from exhaustion. These condemned unfortunates constituted, potentially, over two-thirds of the population. They were systematically arrested, interrogated, and tortured until they implicated others, and then executed. The executions involved entire families, including small children, for Pol Pot believed that dissenting ideas and attitudes, derived from one’s social position, education, or occupation, were “evil microbes” that spread like disease. Members of the Communist Party, considered susceptible to contagion, were also subject to liquidation. After the Vietnamese expelled the Khmer Rouge from Cambodia, they discovered mountains of skulls of its victims.

        The peasants were not spared, being driven into “cooperatives” modeled on the Chinese. The state appropriated all the food produced by these communes and, as in pharaonic Egypt, having stored it in temples and other government depositories, doled it out at its discretion. These measures upset traditional rural practices and led to food shortages that in 1978-1979, following an unusually severe drought, brought a massive famine.

        The killings intensified throughout the forty-four months that the Khmer Rouge controlled Cambodia. People were executed for such offenses as being late to work, complaining about food, criticizing the government, or engaging in premarital sex. In sadism, the brutalities were fully comparable to those perpetrated by the Nazis....

        Cases were reported of children being ordered to kill their parents.

        The toll of these massacres was appalling. According to reliable estimates, the population of Cambodia at the time the Khmer Rouge seized power in 1975 was 7.3 million; when the Vietnamese took over in 1978, it has declined to 5.8 million. Allowing for the natural population increase during the intervening four years, it should have been over 8 million. In other words, the Pol Pot regime was responsible for the death or population deficit of some 2 million Cambodian citizens, or over one-quarter of the population. These victims represented the best educated and most skilled elements of the nation. The gruesome experiment has been characterized as a “human tragedy of almost unprecedented proportions [that] occurred because political theoreticians carried out their grand design on the unsuspecting Khmer people.”

        It may be noted that there were no demonstrations anywhere in the world against these outrages and the United Nations passed no resolutions condemning them. The world took them in stride, presumably because they were committed in what was heralded as a noble cause.


[Some Western intellectuals, unwilling to blame this unprecedented slaughter on the Communists, attributed it to the Americans, who in 1969-1973 had bombed Cambodia in an attempt to destroy the Vietcong forces that had sought refuge there. It is difficult to see, however, why the Cambodians’ rage against the Americans would vent itself in the killing of 2 million of their own people...]

FEDERALIST ONE

History will teach us that the former has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism than the latter, and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.

HAMILTON 

To the People of the State of New York (October 27, 1787):

AFTER an unequivocal experience of the inefficacy of the subsisting federal government, you are called upon to deliberate on a new Constitution for the United States of America. The subject speaks its own importance; comprehending in its consequences nothing less than the existence of the UNION, the safety and welfare of the parts of which it is composed, the fate of an empire in many respects the most interesting in the world. It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force. If there be any truth in the remark, the crisis at which we are arrived may with propriety be regarded as the era in which that decision is to be made; and a wrong election of the part we shall act may, in this view, deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of mankind. This idea will add the inducements of philanthropy to those of patriotism, to heighten the solicitude which all considerate and good men must feel for the event. Happy will it be if our choice should be directed by a judicious estimate of our true interests, unperplexed and unbiased by considerations not connected with the public good. But this is a thing more ardently to be wished than seriously to be expected. The plan offered to our deliberations affects too many particular interests, innovates upon too many local institutions, not to involve in its discussion a variety of objects foreign to its merits, and of views, passions and prejudices little favorable to the discovery of truth.

Among the most formidable of the obstacles which the new Constitution will have to encounter may readily be distinguished the obvious interest of a certain class of men in every State to resist all changes which may hazard a diminution of the power, emolument, and consequence of the offices they hold under the State establishments; and the perverted ambition of another class of men, who will either hope to aggrandize themselves by the confusions of their country, or will flatter themselves with fairer prospects of elevation from the subdivision of the empire into several partial confederacies than from its union under one government. It is not, however, my design to dwell upon observations of this nature. I am well aware that it would be disingenuous to resolve indiscriminately the opposition of any set of men (merely because their situations might subject them to suspicion) into interested or ambitious views. Candor will oblige us to admit that even such men may be actuated by upright intentions; and it cannot be doubted that much of the opposition which has made its appearance, or may hereafter make its appearance, will spring from sources, blameless at least, if not respectable—the honest errors of minds led astray by preconceived jealousies and fears. So numerous indeed and so powerful are the causes which serve to give a false bias to the judgment, that we, upon many occasions, see wise and good men on the wrong as well as on the right side of questions of the first magnitude to society. This circumstance, if duly attended to, would furnish a lesson of moderation to those who are ever so much persuaded of their being in the right in any controversy. And a further reason for caution, in this respect, might be drawn from the reflection that we are not always sure that those who advocate the truth are influenced by purer principles than their antagonists. Ambition, avarice, personal animosity, party opposition, and many other motives not more laudable than these, are apt to operate as well upon those who support as those who oppose the right side of a question. Were there not even these inducements to moderation, nothing could be more ill-judged than that intolerant spirit which has, at all times, characterized political parties. For in politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. Heresies in either can rarely be cured by persecution. And yet, however just these sentiments will be allowed to be, we have already sufficient indications that it will happen in this as in all former cases of great national discussion. A torrent of angry and malignant passions will be let loose. To judge from the conduct of the opposite parties, we shall be led to conclude that they will mutually hope to evince the justness of their opinions, and to increase the number of their converts by the loudness of their declamations and the bitterness of their invectives. 

An enlightened zeal for the energy and efficiency of government will be stigmatized as the offspring of a temper fond of despotic power and hostile to the principles of liberty. An over-scrupulous jealousy of danger to the rights of the people, which is more commonly the fault of the head than of the heart, will be represented as mere pretense and artifice, the stale bait for popularity at the expense of the public good. It will be forgotten, on the one hand, that jealousy is the usual concomitant of love, and that the noble enthusiasm of liberty is apt to be infected with a spirit of narrow and illiberal distrust. On the other hand, it will be equally forgotten that the vigor of government is essential to the security of liberty; that, in the contemplation of a sound and well-informed judgment, their interest can never be separated; and that a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidden appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government. History will teach us that the former has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism than the latter, and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.


Alexander Hamilton; Madison, James; Jay, John. The Federalist Papers (1-3). Roma Solodoff. Kindle Edition.