“Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.”
Now, suppose confiscationists, whether styling themselves socialists, bolsheviki, single-taxers, or non-partisan leaguers, shall get control and, by referendum, extend the scope of treason to include such offenses as claiming title to real estate, which all the breed insist rightfully belongs to the people en masse. Far less degrees of what they consider “crime” were made punishable by death when democracy went mad in France. Of what use would the express provisions of the Constitution be if the power to recall decisions, as well as the judges who render them, is to be exercised by the mass?
Leave it to the people to afford protection from the people and you might just as well abolish all constitutional guarantees. Were the people en masse to make the laws, en masse to interpret the laws, and en masse to enforce the laws, the individual would have no rights that the people en masse would be bound to respect.
SOVIET RUSSIA AND AMERICAN REVOLUTION
In a widely circulated pamphlet, “A Voice Out of Russia,” the author speaks of “a certain divine sense in which the Russian revolution parallels the revolt of the thirteen American colonies, and in which the proletariat of Russia is striving to accomplish for his world much the same ideals which our forefathers laid down for theirs. There was,” he says, “more of the spirit of the people, more of faith and dependence in the proletariat, in American revolutionary doctrines, than we seem disposed to admit today; and by the same token, it is because we have lost our sense of fundamental democracy that we do not care to admit it.”
“Fundamental democracy” is the correct term. But we have not lost it. We are simply in danger of getting it. It is exactly what the Fathers sought to eliminate and prevent.
On the next page of the pamphlet, the author says: “The writers of the American Constitution certainly strove to do away with the artificial complexities of politics, and to bring every function of government within the grasp and comprehension of the whole electorate.”
I submit that that is exactly what the framers of the Constitution did not seek to do. They created representative government and sought to guard against direct government. The author quoted, and every other teacher of revolution, either by peaceful or violent means, is seeking to establish direct government. When they use the word “democracy,” they use it in its dictionary sense. They use it as Rousseau, Robespierre, Lenine, Trotsky and a very large number of others, including some widely known Americans, use it. Why do liberty-loving Americans seek to divorce the word “democracy” from its original meaning and popularize the greatest enemy liberty has ever known?
PLATO’S DREAM
One of the best and most conservative newspapers in the United States printed late in 1918 a carefully written editorial under the above title, from which I quote a few disconnected sentences, italicizing the most important: