Only a few men had affairs that took them
across state lines. Even fewer had reason to go abroad. Most voters
lived their whole lives in one environment, and with nothing but a few
feeble newspapers, some pamphlets, political speeches, their religious
training, and rumor to go on, they had to conceive that larger
environment of commerce and finance, of war and peace. The number of
public opinions based on any objective report was very small in
proportion to those based on casual fancy.
And so for many different reasons, self-sufficiency was a spiritual
ideal in the formative period. The physical isolation of the township,
the loneliness of the pioneer, the theory of democracy, the Protestant
tradition, and the limitations of political science all converged to
make men believe that out of their own consciences they must extricate
political wisdom. It is not strange that the deduction of laws from
absolute principles should have usurped so much of their free energy.
The American political mind had to live on its capital. In legalism it
found a tested body of rules from which new rules could be spun
without the labor of earning new truths from experience. The formulae
became so curiously sacred that every good foreign observer has been
amazed at the contrast between the dynamic practical energy of the
American people and the static theorism of their public life. That
steadfast love of fixed principles was simply the only way known of
achieving self-sufficiency.
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