Saturday, November 1, 2014

The Anti-Federalists' Prescience


The Anti-Federalists’ Prescience
P. Schultz
November 1, 2014

These quotes came to me from a friend. They are worth recalling every so often.

[1] Anti-Federalist Papers: Cato #5: "In my last number I endeavored to prove...[t]hat we would be governed by favorites and flatterers, or that a dangerous council would be collected from the great officers of state, -- that the ten miles square, if the remarks of one of the wisest men, drawn from the experience of mankind, may be credited, would be the asylum of the base, idle, avaricious and ambitious, and that the court would possess a language and manners different from yours" (http://www.constitution.org/afp/cato_05.htm).

“Wherever they looked in the new Constitution the Anti-Federalists saw threats to civic virtue.  The federal city provided for would breed monarchical institutions and courtly habits, with their oppressive tendencies and with the effect 'above all [of] the perpetual ridicule of virtue’[1] (Storing, What the Anti-Federalists Were For, p. 20).

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