Imperial Stars 2-Republic and Empire Read Free

her prayers. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own."
    In this century, John F. Kennedy could say that America would "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to ensure the survival and success of liberty." We may not, in fact, have fulfilled all of Kennedy's promises, but we have gone abroad in search of monsters, which, alas, we failed to destroy.
     
    During the hot summer of 1787, as remarkable a group of men as was ever assembled met in Philadelphia to write a Constitution for the newly independent United Colonies. All had some kind of political influence, but many were scholars, and most were much more familiar with history than would be any collection of that many politicians we might assemble today. They were all well aware of the cycles, and they were determined to found a nation that might escape them. "A new day now begins," they said, and so it was written onto the Great Seal of the United States. Our New Order would be neither democracy nor monarchy, but a mixed form—one that might endure so long as we were worthy of it.
    "What have we?" an onlooker asked of Ben Franklin when the work was done. "A republic or a monarchy?"
    "A republic, Madam, if we can keep it."
    Many believed, and time seems to have proved, that the Philadelphia Constitution was the most perfect instrument of government ever devised by mankind. Certainly, it brought relative peace and absolute prosperity, and endured practically unchanged for generations; in fact, until the present.
    This generation has seen more fundamental change in the nature of our Republic than any previous one. We have come a long way from the mixed Republic, and a long way toward a pure democracy. We have changed from a public philosophy of reliance on individual responsibility to a preference for collectivism. We have not so much disparaged liberty, but we have made security, not liberty, the highest goal of the state.
    "Those who would give up essential liberty for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety," Franklin warned us. We have come perilously close to doing that.
     
"The state was the great gainer of the twentieth century, and the central failure. Up to 1914, it was rare for the public sector to embrace more than 10 percent of the economy. By the 1970s, even in liberal countries, the state took up to 45 percent of the GNP. But whereas, at the time of the Versailles Treaty, most intelligent people believed that an enlarged stage could increase the sum total of human happiness, by the 1980s, the view was held by no one outside a small, diminishing, and dispirited band of zealots. The experiment had been tried in innumerable ways, and it had failed in nearly all of them. The state had proven itself to be an insatiable spender, an unrivaled waster. Indeed, in the twentieth century, it had proven itself the great killer of all time. By the 1980s, state action had been responsible for the violent or unnatural deaths of over 100 million people—more perhaps than it had hitherto succeeded in destroying during the whole of human history up to 1900. Its inhuman malevolence had more than kept pace with its growing size and expanding means.
    "What was not clear was whether the fall from grace of the state would likewise discredit its agents, the activist politicians, whose phenomenal rise in numbers and authority was the most important development of modern times. As we have noted, by the turn of the century, politics was replacing religion as the chief form of zealotry. To archetypes of the new class, such as Lenin, Hitler, and Mao Tse-tung, politics—by which they meant the engineering of society for lofty purposes—was the one legitimate form of moral activity, the only sure means of improving humanity. This view, which would have struck an earlier age as fantastic,