Liberty Letters Quote of the Day, Richard Henry Lee (with commentary by Steve Farrell)
A corrupted people and republicanism cannot co-exist. - Richard Henry Lee
Richard Henry Lee (1732 to 1794) was a statesman from Virginia, noted for his motion in the Second Continental Congress calling for the colonies’ independence from Great Britain. This June 1776 resolution led to the United States Declaration of Independence, which he signed. Also noteworthy: he served a single term as the President of the Continental Congress, and later as a U.S. Senator from Virginia (1789 to 1792) under the new Constitution.
Though this principle is often scoffed at today, and in the public classroom, is taboo, Lee, like the rest of his fellow Founders, understood that representative government survives only so long as the people are religious and moral. For the representative principle of a republic almost perfectly insures a corrupt government is the offspring of a corrupt citizenry. To compound the matter, widespread moral dissolution insures the people will lack the resolve or strength of character to fight back against wicked government. Indeed, the more dissolute the people become, the more likely it become that they won’t even notice that Leviathan’s grip is placed firmly upon their neck and that its grip is tightening. No indeed, rather such a people will likely be among the ranks of those who clamor for an ever greater nanny state to provide their every need at the expense of their more ‘fortunate’ neighbor, until they, at last, right along side of their neighbor, perish in an act of national suicide.
Liberty Letters is a project of The Moral Liberal. Compiled, and edited (with occasional commentary) by Steve Farrell.
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