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From: "Lawrence Mayka" <>
Subject: Re: [GENEALOGY-DNA] Response re: revolution
Date: Fri, 1 Sep 2006 21:49:07 -0500
In-Reply-To: <20060901152919.22632.qmail@web57011.mail.re3.yahoo.com>


I really think that emotional political debates--whether current or 230
years old--are inappropriate for this mailing list.

But of course, I now feel obliged to point something out.

> From:
> [mailto:] On Behalf Of Michael Maddi
> Just to summarize those principles - every human being
> possessed God-given rights which no government could alienate
> or apply to only some (hereditary) section of society,
> government existed to ensure order and promote the common
> good and the best government was one in which checks and
> balances were used to stop any move toward unitary, arbitrary
> power by one man or faction. Those principles are very
> different from those that the British Empire imposed on its
> colonies and even its own people in the British Isles.

1) Almost every state only allowed landowners to vote (even aside from other
restrictions like skin color, sex, and age):

http://content.scholastic.com/browse/article.jsp?id=4638
---
But in order to cast a vote in the new democracy, one had to be white
(except in a few Northern states), male (except in New Jersey, where women
voted until 1807), and a landowner (nearly everywhere). In some places, that
left more than 85 percent of the adult population out of the political
process.
---

2) The constitution of the Polish-Lithuanian Republic, which preceded that
of the United States by over two hundred years, provided for extensive and
eminently effective checks on individual or factional power. Most
18th-century "sages" considered those checks and balances to be a hindrance
to effective action, and therefore a primary cause of the Republic's
progressive demise. Such "sages" recommended a powerful hereditary monarchy
instead.

Today, of course, it is obvious that the United States' success with a
limited-powers, checks-and-balances government was primarily due to its
geographical placement between two oceans instead of between two rapacious
despotic empires. This is not to say that the Polish-Lithuanian Republic
did not have its own constitutional flaws, only that those of the American
constitution were arguably at least as glaring, but due to geography not
nearly as fatal. It is obvious, after all, that the United States was able
to survive its civil war only because its geography made foreign
intervention impractical.


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