James Madison:

We are free today substantially but the day will come when our Republic will be an impossibility. It will be impossibility because wealth will be concentrated in the hands of a few. A republic cannot stand upon bayonets, and when that day comes, when the wealth of the nation will be in the hands of a few, then we must rely upon the wisdom of the best elements in the country to readjust the laws of the nation to the changed conditions.

As a certain French monarch found, you can’t treat people like shit indefinitely.

18 Comments

But but but according to Teabaggers this isn’t part of the founding fathers of US America meant!!!! It was tried and twoo libertarian values (whatever the hell they are.)

It’s an awesome quote, but unfortunately Madison didn’t write it.

@SanFranLefty: Nice teaser. When will you enlighten us?

Discussion at Snopes suggests the quote can’t be found in Madison’s writings online. Earliest identified reference is described such:

The following address was delivered extemporaneously by Daniel De Leon on June 5, 1900, during a debate at the 10th National Convention of the Socialist Labor Party.

Everyone’s quoting De Leon quoting Madison without sourcing.

@DElurker: @blogenfreude: As much as I liked it, it just didn’t sound as if it was written in the style of the 18th Century. (Curse my mother, the U.S. History teacher, who made me read the founding fathers’ and mothers’ writings when I was a kid).

So I cut-and-paste it and Googled it, and the source is a book published by the Communist Party that quotes another book that doesn’t seem to exist, and then next hits were snopes and reddit, where numerous commenters were noting the same thing. I then went to the Library of Congress website and searched the text of the Federalist Papers and Madison’s letters and it doesn’t appear anywhere.

That’s all.

Sorry.

@nojo: And the Communist publications pointed to the quote originally appearing in the New York Post. I didn’t check there, since I figured (a) the paper’s archives don’t go back to the 1790s, and (b) even if they did, Murdoch would purge something like that.

/scurries off to check the NYP website – I should have been a librarian.

UPDATE: Why does the New York Post’s website suck so bad? Damn site almost crashed my computer. And the online archives only go back to 1998.

P.S. @blogenfreude: Just so you know, I didn’t point it out to diminish from the substance of the post, which I think is well-taken. Madison had some things to say about inequality and the dangers of war. It’s my instinctive editor/investigator/legal brief-writer reflex to always want to see the original source.

@SanFranLefty: I know you didn’t mean to diminish … bad on me for believing something on my torts prof’s blog.

@blogenfreude: That quote’s been flying around the fleabaggersphere, according to Snopes. Turley got swept up in the wave.

@bloggie: No, shame on your torts prof to hand over the reins to a guest blogger w/o checking in and supervising.

The kid put a scratch on Turley’s Porsche/blog is all… Hopefully he’ll be kind to the kid when the feedback comes in.

@SanFranLefty:
genealogybank.com has
The New York Morning Post from 1783 – 1792,
New-York Evening Post (1744 – 1752) ,
New-York Gazette, and Weekly Mercury (1768 – 1783)
Several other historical papers. Subscription site, but very good resource.

Also, while Google has ended it’s newspaper digitizing program and made it nearly impossible to access the archive, you can easily find them using this link: http://news.google.com/newspapers#N

The time has come for the left to make its case.

I despised, loathed, detested, and wanted to piss on the Stewart/Colbert smugfest in DC. It did incalculable damage. I still can’t watch their cable shows.

Our president can’t do Hope unless we get behind him.

Snark is death. Grow up. Take charge of your life.

Don’t let them live it for you.

@blogenfreude: Dude – was it wrong to blow away a guy in a Mercedes 450 SL (late 70’s, I’d guess) with my ten year old Toyota Tacoma pick up? I was headed out of town on a house call to a friend’s ranch with a coyote problem to sight in his rifle. I saw the guy in the Benz coming up behind me on I-25 outside of Santa Fe so I sped up to give him some room. I put the truck up to 95 – 100 and dude could not catch up. He pulled into the slow lane and I wingmanned him at 95 as I hit on the bottle of Pellegrino and munched some almonds while listening to college football shows on the AM band. Dude would not even look over as I matched his speed.

We got my friend’s rifle, a vintage Western Auto hardware store .30-30 with a red dot optic I gave him for Christmas, hitting where we wanted, then took it in and ate some big ol floppy steaks. After dinner we ranged a bunch of targets between 75 and 225 yards in a 180 degree arc from his front porch. They lost two goats to a bear and a chicken to a coyote. One woman up the road from them lost nine goats to a bear, and another couple found paw and stand up nose prints from a bear on their front door. Game and Fish trapped a bear up there and it became the 150th or so black bear put down for depredation in New Mexico this year.

Apparently the dry summer associated with the mythological climate change means less food for the bears up in las montanas, so they’re raiding trash, berry patches, and melon and pumpkin fields. Good thing it’s not for real.

Metallica – That Was Just Your Life. Thrash!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVWSKiLGy8U

@redmanlaw: 150? Holy crap. I doubt we do a tenth of that in Cal. Here in So Cal, rogue bears tend to take a swim in some canyon-dweller’s pool or snag a few peaches.

@Dodgerblue: And the Golden Bear on your flag? Alls ya got there now is Oski. :-(

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