United States or Afghanistan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Hence judges thought it within their province to denounce political agitators when charging a grand jury. Chief Justice Ellsworth, in a charge delivered in Massachusetts, denounced "the French system-mongers, from the quintumvirate at Paris to the Vice-President and minority in Congress, as apostles of atheism and anarchy, bloodshed, and plunder."
What does this show? Why, that systems are all arbitrary, and suited to a certain order of minds in a certain stage of development; and that system-mongers are like spiders, who spin their webs out of their own bowels. Mr. Harrison's definition of Agnosticism shows it to be merely Atheism in disguise.
Perhaps there would be less trouble about classification, if the system-mongers would consent to admit at the outset that no infallible system is possible, and would endeavor, amid all their other learning, to learn a little of the saving grace of modesty.
The approaches to absolute power, under the less alarming title of centralization, though insidious, have long been apparent to all who study the workings of system-mongers.
It imparts a freedom, an elasticity, an expansiveness, to English political notions, and gives our people a confidence in free institutions and popular government, which they would never have drawn from the most eloquent assumptions of speculative system-mongers, nor from any other source whatever, save practical experience carefully observed and rationally interpreted.
Word Of The Day