G. Washington: Not even the best human institution, not even a divine institution, is a guarantee against human crime and folly

If the blessings of Heaven showered thick around us should be spilled on the ground or converted to curses, through the fault of those for whom they were intended, it would not be the first instance of folly or perverseness in short-sighted mortals. The blessed Religion revealed in the word of God will remain an eternal and awful monument to prove that the best Institutions may be abused by human depravity; and that they may even, in some instances be made subservient to the vilest of purposes. Should, hereafter, those who are entrusted with the management of this government, incited by the lust of power and prompted by the Supineness or venality of their Constituents, overleap the known barriers of this Constitution and violate the unalienable rights of humanity: it will only serve to shew, that no compact among men (however provident in its construction and sacred in its ratification) can be pronounced everlasting and inviolable, and if I may so express myself, that no Wall of words, that no mound of parchment. can be so formed as to stand against the sweeping torrent of boundless ambition on the one side, aided by the sapping current of corrupted morals on the other.

(Fragment of unused draft of Washington’s First Inaugural address.)

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New Sisyphus writes:

I am so moved and impressed with the unused inaugural address fragment that you posted today that I will be similarly posting it on my blog. It is simply stunning. I had not been aware of this unused fragment before today.

LA replies:

Yes, it’s remarkable. I must have read it before, because the unused inaugural address draft is included in George Washington, A Collection, p. 454, and I read it there. Washington himself discarded the draft because he felt it was too radical, and later historians have had to piece the address together from fragments because a “thoughtless scholar” scattered its pages after Washington’s death. While still a series of fragments, it is published in its most complete and continuous form in George Washington: A Collection, but it’s still not easy to get into. Actually, I came upon the passage this morning in the appendix of Michael and Jana Novak’s Washington’s God, and it seemed entirely new to me.

Gintas writes:

That’s a great quote. The created order is a hierarchy, with God at the top of course. There are positions (and systems) of authority in there, and there are people placed in those positions. As Washington states, those people might not be saintly, and many even abuse their positions for various reasons and in various ways. That doesn’t make the position or system itself bad. None of this is controversial, as conservatives have never rejected the legitimacy of government in general.

But the rebellious anti-proper-authority spirit of liberalism uses any failures of people or systems in the hierarchy as excuses to rearrange that hierarchy, or even abolish it. But not having a proper order leaves a vacuum, and what is set in place is the anti-order. Think of it as the negative of a photo, or an “inverted world”. I think of Augustine’s comment, “Even those who set themselves up against you do but copy you in a perverse way.”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 21, 2007 10:31 AM | Send