ALEXANDER HAMILTON
What do the clouds on the social horizon predict? Is Nature a book of fate? If so, is it sealed or open? Whoever understands the political actions of the past can foresee the reactions of the future.
Human nature is always the same.
The two things brought to the surface by great upheavals are extreme virtues and extreme vices. The virtue of self sacrifice, on the one hand, the vice of self interest on the other. Vice is flexible, cunning, adaptable.
You are living at a time when profiteers amaze by their cynical audacity, but profiteers have always existed. Before the war the nobles of Russia and Germany were profiteers in landed privileges and governmental perquisites. The tillers of the soil were free in name, serfs in practice. In England two or three hundred lords and peers possess the land. In America food profiteering began during the Civil War. This national vice has never been attacked at the roots.
Your age is characterized by a high level of predatory ability and a low level of prophetic visibility.
The old hackneyed phrase, “This is a free country,” has been applied in varying degrees according to the caprice of the individual with the most aggressive will.
New words, definitions, excuses, have been invented to meet the new conditions, but of all the words yet brought into use, “camouflage” is the only one that covers the cynical effrontery of predatory hypocrisy. It is a vocable of universal utility. It applies to the cock-pits of commerce as well as to the arena of bull and bear politics.
It depicts a Hindoo patience in the pulpit and a Hoodoo palsy in the pews.
The word “democracy” itself is the stripes painted on the sides of the old Ship of State in her zig-zag course to elude the torpedoes of the proletarian submarines.
A capitalistic profiteer is a high brow optimist who lives by the sweat of the low brow pessimist. The stretching process will cease suddenly like the snapping of a rubber string stretched beyond the limit.
The masses without a voice always find articulation in the unlooked-for man, the unlooked-for group.
The people without a mouthpiece are a mob, and no mob can run itself for more than a few days. It is the initiated who lead, and leadership requires time, patience, judgment.
In the world of genius there are no upstarts.
The great leader never rises suddenly. Bonaparte was a military graduate, Grant was a product of West Point, Lincoln was thirty years preparing for the Presidency, Lenine spent twenty years in the study of economics. All countries have the same experience.
Voltaire endowed the middle classes of France with a voice, united the disaffected of all classes, and peppered their indignation with pungent epigrams. He created an intellectual garden for lovers of liberty, and from the realm of the mind flung the thorns of ridicule in the face of titled imbeciles and crowned the heads of scholars with laurel.
The people of France were washed by Louis XIV, wrung by Louis XV, and dried in the back yard of tyrannical economics by Louis XVI.
But it was the orators and pamphleteers who ironed out the frills and furbelows of the old order.
Statistical facts may convince but they do not compel. Who knows how the French Revolution would have ended had Mirabeau, orator of the great and solemn days, survived to put into action the idealism of Rousseau? Intellect alone never passes the halfway house. When intellect, reason and emotion are fused in one, the summit of achievement is attained.