Although this man was not an American, I believe his quotations should be inserted here:
In the war's aftermath:
Englishman Sir John Dahlberg, also known as Lord Acton, whose most famous quote is, "Absolute power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely" wrote Lee after the northern victory. Dahlberg was one of, if not the most erudite political philosophers of his time. In his letter asking for Lee's opinion of the result of the war he wrote:
".....The institutions of your Republic have not exercised on the old world the salutary and liberating influence which ought to have belonged to them, by reason of those defects and abuses of principle which the Confederate Constitution was expressly and wisely calculated to remedy. Therefore I deemed that you were fighting the battles of our liberty, our progress, and our civilization; and I mourn for the stake which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo."
Lee replied: "I yet believe that the maintenance of the rights and authority reserved to the states and to the people, essential to safeguard ..the continuance of a free government. whereas the consolidation of the states into one vast republic, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of that ruin which has overwhelmed all those that have preceded it... The South has contended only for the supremacy of the Constitution, and the just administration of the laws made in pursuance to it."
Later Dahlberg wrote an analysis of the war in which he said:
"The North has used the doctrines of Democracy to destroy self-government. The South applied the principle of conditional federation to cure the evils and to correct the errors of a false interpretation of Democracy...[and the inevitable result of an unfettered federal government will be] the initiative in administration; the function of universal guardian and paymaster;
the resources of coercion, intimidation, and corruption; the habit of preferring the public interest of the moment to the established law; .............. a public creditor; a prodigious budget these things will remain to the future government of the Federal Union, and will make it approximate more closely to the imperial than to the republican type of democracy."
(Message edited by johan_steele on March 23, 2004)
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