I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them.
Galileo Galilei, Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina (1615).
“Anything whatever can be made ridiculous; to see this side of it, and nothing more, is to become the mere jester, whose claim to be regarded as the ideal moralist is cer tainly very slight. But between a too solemn sense of high importance, and that conviction of the intrinsic smallness of everything in particular which some of our satirists have displayed, there is a middle ground.”
Arthur Kenyon Rogers, The Theory of Ethics (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1922).
On June 21, 1915, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down an Oklahoma law denying the right to vote to some citizens. In Guinn v. United States, the Supreme Court found “grandfather clauses” in effect in several formerly slave states to be little more than sneaky ways of allowing illiterate white folks to vote while disallowing illiterate black folks.
On this date in 1787, at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, it was moved and debated to confine legislative powers to two distinct branches, and to strike the word “national” from the document.
The final wording eventually became “All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.”
And, yes, the word “national” does not occur anywhere in the Constitution.
As long as the democratic revolution was glowing with heat, the men who were bent upon the destruction of old aristocratic powers hostile to that revolution displayed a strong spirit of independence; but as the victory of the principle of equality became more complete, they gradually surrendered themselves to the propensities natural to that condition of equality, and they strengthened and centralized their governments. They had sought to be free in order to make themselves equal; but in proportion as equality was more established by the aid of freedom, freedom itself was thereby rendered of more difficult attainment.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. 2 (1840).
Oh, the richness of this political season has made for something strange. What sea change comes next?
Paul Jacob, on Townhall this weekend, discusses one such possible, momentous motion of the rich and strange. Click on over, then come back here:
In 1941, Czech economist and politician Václav Klaus was born; other June 19 births include Salman Rushdie in 1947, Kathleen Turner in 1954, and Laura Ingraham in 1964.
Paul Jacob discusses the incentives and disincentives for politicians to serve the public. With some focus, this episode, on the Democratic Party.
CSV20160613-They Must Suffer from Paul Jacob on Vimeo.
On June 18, 1838, Auberon Edward William Molyneux Herbert was born.
Auberon Herbert was a Liberal Member of Parliament who, after reading the writings of Herbert Spencer, became a radical individualist and author of essays such as “The Ethics of Dynamite,” “A Politician in Trouble About His Soul,” and “The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State.”
“There is no real paradox in the claim that satisfaction is open only to the man who stands prepared to give up pleasures. This only means, again, that satisfaction as a human goal is not an abstract ideal of limitless good, but presupposes a determinate human nature set to work out its destiny in determinate surroundings. That at which a sensible, human being aims is no unimaginable state of the intensest possible pleasure unaccompanied by pain, but the realization that he is making the very most of life that it is possible for him, with his particular interests and limita tions, to make, considering the means at his disposal. If one is not willing to accept these qualifications, he is not yet prepared to set out intelligently to secure satisfaction.”
Arthur Kenyon Rogers, The Theory of Ethics (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1922).