Slovakia celebrates a Constitution Day on September 1, for the Constitution passed by the Slovak National Council on September 1, 1992.
The Slovaks place their rights provision early in their document, like most American states, and not as amendments, as in the Constitution of the United States of America.
Francis Amasa Walker, defining the subject of his Money, Trade and Industry (1889), first page.
That is money; all that is money; only that is money, which performs a certain office. To parody a familiar proverb: Money is that Money does.
On August 31, 1870, educator Maria Montessori was born.
August 31 serves as Independence Day for Kyrgyzstan, Malaysia, and Trinidad and Tobago.
What is heterodox for the wider culture may be orthodox for the intelligentsia.
George Orwell, unfinished review of Evelyn Waugh, in Our Job Is to Make Life Worth Living: 1949–1950 (2001), as quoted by David Ramsay Steele, Orwell Your Orwell: A Worldview on the Slab (2017), p. 56.
On August 30, 1918, Fanny Yefimovna Kaplan shot and seriously injured Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin. Though certainly justifiable on some primary level — evil killers with power probably deserve to be killed in turn — this assassination attempt, like most such, had disastrous consequences, prompting the mass arrests and executions known as the Red Terror.
August 30, 1999, saw East Timor’s referendum vote for independence from Indonesia succeed.
Francis Amasa Walker, Political Economy (third edition, revised and enlarged, 1888), pp. 507-508.
There is not and there never can be any positive virtue in restraint.
Modern fashions of thinking have done a deadly hurt to the happiness of our race by their insistence upon the helplessness of the mind and the will.
John Cowper Powys, A Philosophy of Solitude (1933), p. 122
August 29 marks the 1632 birthday of British philosopher John Locke, author of Two Treatises of Government, and one of the strongest intellectual influences on America’s 18th century secessionist movement and subsequent constitutional thinking. Locke died on October 28, 1704.
On August 29, 1786, Shays’ Rebellion began. The rebellion was an armed uprising of Massachusetts farmers reacting very negatively against the high debt and tax burdens enacted to pay off the Revolutionary War. This rebellion scared American leaders into revising the Articles of Confederation, a process that led not to a mere few changes, but to the writing of a whole new Constitution.
The representative system is nothing but an organization by means of which a nation charges a few individuals to do what it cannot or does not wish to do herself. Poor men look after their own business; rich men hire stewards. This is the history of ancient and modern nations. The representative system is a proxy given to a certain number of men by the mass of the people who wish their interests to be defended and who nevertheless do not have the time to defend them themselves.
But, unless they are idiots, rich men who employ stewards keep a close watch on whether these stewards are doing their duty, lest they should prove negligent, corruptible, or incapable; and, in order to judge the management of these proxies, the landowners, if they are prudent, keep themselves well informed about affairs, the management of which they entrust to them. Similarly, the people who, in order to enjoy the liberty that suits them, resort to the representative system, must exercise an active and constant surveillance over their representatives, and reserve for themselves, at times that should not be separated by too lengthy intervals, the right to discard them if they betray their trust, and to revoke the powers they might have abused.
Benjamin Constant, On the Liberty of the Ancients Compared to that of the Moderns (“De la Liberté des Anciens Comparée à celle des Modernes,”1819)
On August 28, 1833, the Slavery Abolition Act received Royal Assent, formally abolishing slavery throughout most the British Empire.