Isegoria

Mencius Moldbug recently cited Walter Millis‘s Road To War: America 1914-1917, which offhandedly refers to one Colonel House, a figure I don’t think I could make up:

Edward Mandell House (July 26, 1858–March 28, 1938) was an American diplomat, politician, and presidential advisor. Commonly known by the purely honorific title of Colonel House, although he had no military experience, he had enormous personal influence with U.S. President Woodrow Wilson as his foreign policy advisor until Wilson removed him in 1919.

This is the especially good part:

In 1912, House published anonymously a novel called Philip Dru: Administrator, in which the title character, Dru, leads the democratic western U.S. in a civil war against the plutocratic East, becoming the dictator of America. Dru as dictator imposes a series of reforms which resemble the Bull Moose platform of 1912 and then vanishes.

So, Wilson’s foreign policy advisor was a colonel with no military experience, who wrote a novel about a progressive dictator saving America. Hmm…

When you claim that yours is the The Flag of Humanity, well, that’s not necessarily good news for everyone else:

If you heard a Hitler say: “the swastika is the flag not only of Germany, but of the world,” you would doubtless be a little concerned. You might think, gee, this Mr. Hitler doesn’t mind sounding like he wants to conquer the entire friggin’ planet.

But when you hear that the Stars and Stripes “is the flag not only of America, but of humanity,” you have a slightly different reaction. And not because you’re a gun-totin’, God-lovin’, truck-drivin’ red-state American. Quite the contrary, in fact.

That’s Mencius Moldbug talking, and he goes on to cite Woodrow Wilson, from July 4, 1914, describing the policy that now bears his name:

My dream is that as the years go on and the world knows more and more of America it will also drink at these fountains of youth and renewal; that it also will turn to America for those moral inspirations which lie at the basis of all freedom; that the world will never fear America unless it feels that it is engaged in some enterprise which is inconsistent with the rights of humanity; and that America will come into the full light of the day when all shall know that she puts human rights above all other rights and that her flag is the flag not only of America but of humanity.

What other great people has devoted itself to this exalted ideal? To what other nation in the world can all eyes look for an instant sympathy that thrills the whole body politic when men anywhere are fighting for their rights?

Mencius adds his thoughts:

Note the particularly charming phrase “unless it feels that it is engaged in…” What Wilson really means is that [no government] will ever fear America unless [America] feels that [that government] is engaged in some enterprise which violates the rights of humanity.

In other words, [the US government] will judge the world. In other words, [the US government] will govern the world. In other words, [the US government] will rule the world. In other words, [the US government] will dominate the world.

The belief that judging is distinct from ruling, that one can “provide global governance” without “grasping world domination,” is not a Wilsonian invention. It is a fundamental part of the American political tradition — the separation of powers. In this case, the separation of executive and judicial authority. One can be an honest broker, without being an imperial overlord.

Rationally — if the term applies — this depends on the concept of “natural law,” ie, a theory of right and wrong which is self-evident to everyone honest. Since [the US government] is always honest, being democratic, it and and any other honest, enterprising government will always agree on whether the latter is “violating the rights of humanity.” And if they don’t, it is. Ergo, [the US government] is always right.

Thus, it is clear that when Serbia wishes to recover a seceded province, it is violating the rights of humanity, whereas when Georgia does the same it is defending them. The former fears America, and rightly so. The latter is helping it support democracy.

So [the US government], the universal democratic nation, may, indeed must, assert its jurisdiction over all. Which it just happens to have the military and financial power to enforce. And is this in the interest of America or Americans? Heaven forfend!
[...]
Lest the odor of cynicism become overpowering, let’s pause for a minute, and admit that there is evil in the world. More specifically, there are evil people. And it is a glorious thing, and good for all and sundry, to wrap a rope around their necks and pull the chair away.

The trouble is that if we truly despise evil, we hope to minimize the amount of it in the world. Wilsonism is not inherently evil. A Petri dish is not inherently bacteria-infested. There is such a thing as a sterile Petri dish. But the combination of world domination and profound self-righteousness is a bath of nutrients as nourishing as evil has ever found. And bacteria are not in short supply.

Why would evil not go abroad in the mask of good? Satan has no fear of masks. Wilson, a deeply mystical man, thought of democracy as a sort of antibiotic which ensured that his Petri dish would always remain pristine. It has not, in my opinion, worked out that way.

But the combination of world domination and profound self-righteousness is a bath of nutrients as nourishing as evil has ever found.

The US government supports Israel, right? Mencius Moldbug isn’t so sure:

At present, however — that is, in the real world, where [the US government] supports Israel — the expectation appears to be that all disputes will be resolved via Israeli concessions. The only dispute appears to be on the magnitude of these concessions. “Land for peace” is a fairly normal way to end a war — for example, France in 1870 accepted the proposition of “land for peace,” ceding Alsace-Lorraine to Germany. On the other hand, France in 1870 had been defeated. Whereas Israel in 1967 was, at least according to all reliable experts, victorious.

So we arrive at a peculiar conclusion. On the one hand, [the US government] supports Israel. On the other hand, if [the US government] ceased to exist, at least for the purposes of the Middle East, Israel’s position seems as if it would become much stronger. A conclusion that would seem to indicate that [the US government] opposes Israel. But then, why would it give Israel billions of dollars and fancy weapons?

We are left to conclude that (a) [the US government] both supports and opposes Israel; (b) the magnitude of the opposition exceeds the magnitude of the support (implying net opposition); and (c) the support is overt and obvious, whereas the opposition is somehow… more subtle.

In other words, we are in the position of an astronomer who sees light being bent away from a large visible object. The astronomer must conclude that unless the laws of gravity are reversed in the vicinity of this object, there is an even larger non-visible object on the other side of the light. The latter can be detected only by inference, but the detection remains unambiguous.

Israel makes a great pons asinorum because in this case, the diplomatic dark matter is not at all hard to find. Perhaps it is best explained by the title of this book, which I saw in a window somewhere. According to the author or at least his title, [the US government] is acting as a “dishonest broker” in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Ie: “justice” in the conflict favors the Palestinians more than [the US government]‘s actions today reflect. Ie: [the US government] is pro-Israel, but not in the sense that [the US government]‘s interventions in the Middle East are a net positive for Israel. Actually, they are detrimental to Israel. But if “justice” were served, they would be even more detrimental.

So if I sue you for $100,000 and the judge awards me $20,000, I might say that the judge is biased in favor of you. Because you still have $80,000 that is rightfully mine. On the other hand, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that the judge forced you to pay me $20,000. Which is $20,000 you’d have and I wouldn’t, if there was no judge at all. An interesting kind of support.

America, you see, is not really the vampire of the world. The analogy is inexact in two ways. One, a vampire is nourished by the blood of his victims. They grow weak and sickly, while he thrives in ruddy good health. Two, it is always easy to know that a vampire has been eatin’ on you, because there are fang-marks on your neck.

America is more the arsonist of the world. As well as the fireman. Wherever fires break out, Uncle Sam is there to pour gasoline on them. The fireman assures us, of course, that he is only setting a backfire to defeat the main blaze. But why is this always the right strategy? Why was he the first one on the scene? Why do his hoses always seem to get tangled, whereas his gas can never runs dry? And why have there been so many more fires since he came to town? But the TV audience sees none of this. All they see is the fireman, fighting the fires.

Mencius Moldbug reserves the right to refer to red-staters, collectively, as Amerikaners:

Like their lexical analogues, the Amerikaners are a cultural group of European stock, but their present-day traditions cannot be easily connected with any group in modern Europe. We cannot say this of the Universalist Eloi of the coasts, whose connection to the English Dissenters and their secular, liberal heirs has been continuous since day one. For example, American traditionalist or “fundamentalist” Christianity, which is nominally Protestant but seems almost Catholic next to the thoroughly Quakerized blue states, has historical roots which are quite obscure and thoroughly American.

His question is, When will the Amerikaners decide that they’ve had enough?

Sixty (60) percent of American voters call themselves “conservative.” Voting as an organized, disciplined bloc, it should be straightforward for them to defeat and destroy the remaining 40 — let’s say 20% Eloi, 20% Morlock. Moreover, if such a majority demands a comprehensive reconstruction of government, not just a cosmetic change among a few ceremonial officials who have no real executive authority, the Eloi and Morlocks can hardly resist them. Especially since the American military class is, almost by definition, Amerikaner.

In retrospect, any such reconstruction would be accepted by all, of whatever caste. The Eloi will see the light, as they always do. As Osama put it: they like the strong horse. In an Amerikaner republic, Eloi will elbow each other out of the way to eat overpriced American food, wear marked-up knockoffs of American prole clothes, live in actual old American buildings, etc, etc.

Of course the Eloi already do these things. But in our New Albion, they will do them with flags, God and guns. (Possibly even Confederate flags.) And the Morlocks will be forced to deal — as they already are. (Although once the bar is reset, I suspect that less force will be required.) [...] And Sarah Palin will put together a small edition of her family’s wise old Alaska sayings, bound in red, white and blue, which fits nicely in the lapel of your blazer.

You may, or may not, be thankful that this is not going to happen. It is not going to happen because the Amerikaners are not organized enough to make it happen. Given infinite time, they will certainly get organized, which is why I say “when” rather than “if.” But time is not on the Amerikaners’ side. Their horse has been weakening for the last century.

The Amerikaners’ problem is that they’re governed by their enemies, the progressives, who have converted democratic politics into a reality show and rule through the extended civil service. The civil service is nominally responsible to the elected arms, but the latter would have to put up a terrible fight to even touch them. And progressives fight the peril of a “populist” democratic reaction with two slow, but inevitably lethal, strangulation tactics: subsidized progressive education, and Morlock voter importation.

The last quasi-successful Amerikaner reaction was the “Return to Normalcy” of the 1920s. Considering the royal ass-whupping the Amerikaners have been taking since then, “normalcy” (which, in classic Amerikaner style, is not even a word) is an awful mild description of the converse. But not even a gentle, Harding-Coolidge style restoration is a real possibility today.

The fatal flaw in the democratic mind of the Amerikaner, or “conservative,” is that he believes that his country’s political system basically works and is the best in the world. It has just gone slightly off the rails in the last few decades. But it can be set right with a minor corrective operation, ie, replacing a few ceremonial officials with good, clean-minded, child-bearing Amerikaners.

This belief system, which has no correlation with reality, is at the heart of “conservatism.” It shows no sign of going away. The fatal allure of insisting that right-wing conservatism is really the true democratic liberalism, the other having strayed, is an irresistible anglerfish lure. (The Rev. Dabney will set you straight.)

Therefore, the Amerikaners are unlikely to organize and act effectively until their electoral position has declined to the point at which a democratic restoration is not only nontrivial, but in fact impossible. At this point, USG [the US government] will have imported tens if not hundreds of millions of new Third World residents. It will be obvious that military government is the only route to any kind of American restoration. The inevitable alternative is a North America indistinguishable from the rest of the Third World.

Have you been to the Third World? The armed forces will have to act. Let’s hope they can all get it together to be on the same side.

Mencius Moldbug has refined his previous five-caste definition of the American social spectrum down to three castes — Eloi, Morlocks, and Proles — and has declared Sarah Palin the proletarian candidate:

You see, the so-called “Democrats” (whom, here at UR, we call the Inner Party) and their purported opposition, the supposed “Republicans” (or Outer Party) have completely different beliefs about the nature, purpose, and function of the office known as the “Presidency,” for which they appear to contend. As usual, the IP is right and the OP is wrong.

To the IP (obviously, also the Eloi-Morlock Party), the so-called “President,” ie, the player whom callers help select in USG’s quadrennial reality show, is hardly a temporal position at all. It is really more of a spiritual office. The Roman pontifex maximus is a fine analogy. I also admire the phrase “bully pulpit,” which I feel could be used a good bit more.

For the IP, for example, the ideal “President” would be Nelson Mandela. But there are obstacles — St. Mandela, for instance, is not an American citizen. At least not in the strict technical sense of the law. Fortunately, our evolving standards of justice may at some point in the future, when we are more spiritually advanced, enable us to overcome this barbarous discrimination. When Archbishop Obama says that “the walls between the countries with the most and the countries with the least cannot stand,” perhaps he actually means it. Who knows, with such a great man? Certainly a good first step would be for a Federal court to realize that Mexicans are actually, in fact, Americans. (It’s not like they were born in Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia or Antarctica.)

But obviously the most sacrilegious possible desecration is one in which an actual, practicing Prole is appointed, by some awful cosmic mistake, to the hallowed post of “President.” It’s basically like having a porn star elected Pope. Even as candidate vice-Pope, it’s way too far. The purpose of the White House is to teach the Proles that it’s wrong to be a Prole, and they need to stop. Now. I mean, duh. Ideally, the LORD would let America know at once of her mistake, and send Hurricane Gustav straight up the Mississippi to demolish the polyester-Americans and their so-called “convention.” (Which, frankly, could be mistaken for a multi-level marketing conference. At least if all you look at is the hair.)

Meanwhile, the OP (or Prole Party) has a completely different view of the “White House.” To the PP, the “President” is the CEO of America.

This illusion can only be sustained by people who either (a) have no idea what Washington is or how it works, or (b) do, but conceal it for their own political benefit. Collectively these individuals are known as “conservatives,” and they make up the right side of your radio dial.

(The radio cannot be adjusted beyond this built-in band. But it can be turned off. Please do not vote for, contribute to, or otherwise support the Outer Party. Outer Party politics is not effective against the Inner Party. Please forward this message to all your Avon subscribers.)

The truth is that the White House changes its entire nature as an organ of government when it changes between Inner and Outer Party control. An Inner Party presidency is simply a different institution from an Outer Party presidency. They are apples and oranges.

When the Inner Party is in, the Presidency is a vestigial organ. It would be a fun experiment to actually abolish the White House for four years. The results would be more or less the same. Every agency in Washington would function not only just as well without the existence of the President, but in fact much better.

For example, my mother was at DOE in the Clinton era. In the renewables area — she did a good bit of work for Joe Romm. Once I asked her what Sched Cs (political appointees) did under Clinton, and she said: “they got a nice office, and they were told to work on whatever they liked.” Indeed the main difference between Inner Party candidates is (a) whether or not they can win, and (b) the set of people among whom they will distribute the Plum Book.

A ceremonial presidency is perfectly consistent with Inner Party values, which stress that “politics” is bad and “public policy” is good, and the two should be stored separately — for more or less the same reason that sewage and wine are not shipped in the same tanker truck. As so often, the IP is exactly right about this. Except for the fact that the word “democracy” occupies the highest possible position on the mental totem pole of the Inner Party mind. If I could explain this, I might still be a believer.

(Moreover, the contradiction itself is a nice bit of misdirection. It points the marks away from inquiring into the nature, ingredients, and origins of the sausage called “policy.” But I digress.)

When an Outer Party man becomes “President,” he soon finds that all his efforts are devoted to solving the essentially unsolvable problem of preventing his name from becoming a historic byword for pure, infamous villainy. Maybe not quite like Hitler or Attila the Hun. But certainly like Mussolini, Richard II, Nixon or Ivan the Terrible.

The basic problem of the Outer Party in the White House is that, with minor exceptions such as the Pentagon, its mission is essentially one of preventing the rest of Washington from doing its job. Or at least what it thinks its job is. The military, of course, is an Outer Party shop, and can always be sent on bloody, expensive and counterproductive ticket-punching adventures. The rest of our permanent government, the civil service proper, is Inner Party to the bone. In fact, perhaps the best way to describe the Inner Party is as the party of the permanent civil service.

Which holds far more power than the White House. The While House can prevail or even contend only in the vast minority of conflicts with the permanent civil service. It is not good for the polls. When an Outer Party presidency’s approval sinks below 40% or so, it is defeated, and the agencies he supposedly “leads” ignore the “President” and all his handlers, cronies and contributors. Since polls are a function of public opinion, public opinion is fabricated by the press, schools and universities, and the latter are perma-pwned by the Inner Party, the resulting barbecue is too inevitable to be really entertaining. It’s best just to play along.

Example: for most of 2008, GWB might as well have been the prime minister of Namibia for all the influence he’s exerted over US foreign policy. Cheney probably wishes he was the prime minister of Namibia.

Historiographic triangulation, Mencius Moldbug explains, is the art of taking two or more opposing positions from the past, and using hindsight to decide who was right and who was wrong:

The wonderful kids at Google, who are all diehard progressives and whom I’m sure would be horrified by the uses I’m making of their services, have done something that I can only compare to Lenin’s old saying about the capitalists: that they would sell the rope that was used to hang them. Likewise, progressives seem determined to publish the books that will discredit them. As in the case of the capitalists, this is because they are good, not because they are evil. But unlike Lenin, we are good as well, and we welcome these accidental forced errors.

I refer, of course, not to any new books. It is very difficult to get reactionary writing published anywhere, even (in fact, especially, because they are so sensitive on the subject) by the conservative presses. However, as UR readers know, the majority of work published before 1922 is on-line at Google. It is often hard to read, missing for bizarre reasons that make no sense (why scan a book from 1881 and then not put the scans online?), badly scanned, etc, etc. But it is there, and as we’ve seen it is quite usable.

And there are two things about the pre-1922 corpus. One, it is far, far to the right of the consensus reality that we now know and love. Just the fact that people in 1922 believed X, while today we believe Y, has to shake your faith in democracy. Was the world of 1922 massively deluded? Or is it ours? It could be both, but it can’t be neither. Indeed, even the progressives of the Belle Epoque often turn out to be far to the right of our conservatives. WTF?

Two, you can use this corpus to conduct a very interesting exercise: you can triangulate. This is an essential skill in defensive historiography. If you like UR, you like defensive historiography.

Historiographic triangulation is the art of taking two or more opposing positions from the past, and using hindsight to decide who was right and who was wrong. The simplest way to play the game is to imagine that the opponents in the debate were reanimated in 2008, informed of present conditions, and reunited for a friendly panel discussion. I’m afraid often the only conceivable result is that one side simply surrenders to the other.

For example, one fun exercise, which you can perform safely for no cost in the privacy of your own home, is to read the following early 20th-century books on the “Negro Question”: The Negro: The Southerner’s Problem, by Thomas Nelson Page (racist, 1904); Following the Color Line, by Ray Stannard Baker (progressive, 1908); and Race Adjustment: Essays on the Negro in America, by Kelly Miller (Negro, 1909). Each of these books is (a) by a forgotten author, (b) far more interesting and well-written than the pseudoscientific schlock that comes off the presses these days, and (c) a picture of a vanished world. Imagine assembling Page, Baker and Miller in a hotel room in 2008, with a videocamera and little glasses of water in front of them. What would they agree on? Disagree on? Dear open-minded progressive, if you fail to profit from this exercise, you simply have no interest in the past.
[...]
In general what I find when I perform this exercise, is that — as far to the right of us as 1922 was — the winner of the triangulation tends to be its rightmost vertex. Not on every issue, certainly, but most. (I’m sure that if I was to try the same trick with, say, Torquemada and Spinoza, the results would be different, but I am out of my historical depth much past the late 18C.)

What’s wonderful is that if you doubt these results, you can play the game yourself. Bored in your high-school class? Read about the Civil War and Reconstruction and slavery. Unless you’re a professional historian, you certainly won’t be assigned the primary sources I just linked to. But no one can stop you, either. (At least not until Google adds a “Flag This Book” button.)

I am certainly not claiming that everything you find in Google Books, or even everything I just linked to, is true. It is not. It is a product of its time. What’s true, however, is that each book is the book it says it is. Google has not edited it. And if it says it was published in 1881, nothing that happened after 1881 can have affected it.

Mencius Moldbug explains that a libertarian democracy is simply an engineering contradiction:

When you say, I am a libertarian, what you mean is: I, as a customer of government, prefer to live in a state which does not apply non-libertarian policies. The best results in this line will be achieved by capturing a state yourself, and becoming its Supreme Ruler. Then no bureaucrats will bother you! Given that most of us are not capable of this feat, and given that the absence of government is a military impossibility, the libertarian should search for a structure of government in which the state has no incentive to apply non-libertarian policies. Obviously, democracy is not such a structure.

Thus a libertarian democracy is simply an engineering contradiction, like a flying whale or a water-powered car. Water is a lot cheaper than gas, and I think a flying whale would make a wonderful pet — I could tether it to my deck, perhaps. Does it matter? Defeating democracy is difficult; making democracy libertarian is impossible. The difference is subtle, but…

Worse, the most competitive ideas in the democratic feedback loop tend to be policies which are in fact counterproductive — that is, they actually cause the problem they pretend to be curing. They are quack medicines. They keep the patient coming back.

He then cites newspaper articles from Britain now and 50 years ago to demonstrate just how “tolerant” Britain has become — and how counterproductive that tolerance is:

Something is normal here, and it is either 1956 or 2008. It can’t be both. If Mr. Justice Donovan, or the Times reporter who considered a mere 60 stitches somehow newsworthy, were to reappear in modern London, their perspective on the art of government in a democratic society unchanged, they would be far to the right not only of Professor Aldridge, but also of the Tories, the BNP, and perhaps even Spearhead. They would not be normal people. But in 1956, their reactions were completely unremarkable.

What’s happened is that Britain, which before WWII was still in many respects an aristocracy, became Americanized and democratized after the war. As a democracy, it elected its own people, who now tolerate what their grandparents would have found unimaginable. Of course, many British voters, probably even most, still do believe that burglars should go to prison, etc, etc, but these views are on the way out, and the politics of love is on the way in. Politicians, who are uniformly devoid of character or personality, have the good sense to side with the future electorate rather than with the past electorate.

And why are the studies of Professor Aldridge and her ilk so successful, despite their obvious effects? One: they result in a tremendous level of crime, which generates a tremendous level of funding for “criminologists.” Two: they are counterintuitive, ie, obviously wrong. No one would pay a “social scientist” to admit the obvious. Three: as per Noah Webster, they appeal to the ruling class simply because they are so abhorrent to the ruled class.

And four: they are not disprovable, because if pure, undiluted Quaker love ever becomes the only way for British civilization to deal with its ferals, they won’t leave much of Professor Aldridge. She might, like Judith Todd, regard her suffering as a Christlike badge of distinction. She would certainly, like Ms. Todd, express no guilt over her actions. But it won’t happen, because Britain will retain the unprincipled exceptions and the few rough men it needs to keep it from the abyss for the indefinite future. And for that same future, Professor Aldridge and her like will be able to explain the debacle in terms of the “cycle of violence.” As Chesterton put it:

We have actually contrived to invent a new kind of hypocrite. The old hypocrite, Tartuffe or Pecksniff, was a man whose aims were really worldly and practical, while he pretended that they were religious.The new hypocrite is one whose aims are really religious, while he pretends that they are worldly and practical.

From the perspective of the customer of government, however, it is irrelevant why these events happen. What matters is that they do happen, and that they do not have to happen.

The second-order problem of democracy, Mencius Moldbug asserts, is that a democratic government elects its own people — please note the witty inversion there — either by importing them or “educating” them:

One way to elect a new people is to import them, of course. For example, to put it bluntly, the Democratic Party has captured California, once a Republican stronghold, by importing arbitrary numbers of Mexicans. Indeed the Third World is stocked with literally billions of potential Democrats, just waiting to come to America so that Washington can buy their votes. Inner Party functionaries cackle gleefully over this achievement.
[...]
But this act of brutal Machiavellian thug politics, larded as usual with the most gushing of sentimental platitudes, is picayune next to the ordinary practice of democratic governments: to elect a new people by re-educating the children of the old. In the long run, power in a democracy belongs to its information organs: the press, the schools, and most of all the universities, who mint the thoughts that the others plant. For simplicity, we have dubbed this complex the Cathedral.

The Cathedral is a feedback loop. It has no center, no master planners. Everyone, even the Sulzbergers, is replaceable. In a democracy, mass opinion creates power. Power diverts funds to the manufacturers of opinion, who manufacture more, etc. Not a terribly complicated cycle.

This feedback loop generates a playing field on which the most competitive ideas are not those which best correspond to reality, but those which produce the strongest feedback. The Cathedral is constantly electing a new people who (a) support the Cathedral more and more, and (b) support a political system which makes the Cathedral stronger and stronger.

For example, libertarian policies are not competitive in the Cathedral, because libertarianism minimizes employment for public-policy experts. Thus we would expect libertarians to come in two flavors: the intellectually marginalized, and the intellectually compromised.

Mencius Moldbug describes the first-order problem of democracy:

[S]ince a governed territory is capital, i.e., a valuable asset, it generates revenue. Participation in government is also the definition of power, which all men and quite a few women crave. At its best, democracy is a permanent, gunless civil war for this gigantic pot of money and power. (At its worst, the guns come out.) Any democratic faction has an incentive to mismanage the whole to enlarge its share.

He notes that without quite understanding this problem, Noah Webster, in his 1794 pamphlet on the French Revolution, described the problem of factions perfectly:

My second remark is, that contention between parties is usually violent in proportion to the trifling nature of the point in question; or to the uncertainty of its tendency to promote public happiness. When an object of great magnitude is in question, and its utility obvious, a great majority is usually found in its favor, and vice versa; and a large majority usually quiets all opposition. But when a point is of less magnitude or less visible utility, the parties may be and often are nearly equal. Then it becomes a trial of strength — each party acquires confidence from the very circumstance of equality — both become assured they are right — confidence inspires boldness and expectation of success — pride comes in aid of argument — the passions are inflamed — the merits of the cause become a subordinate consideration — victory is the object and not public good; at length the question is decided by a small majority — success inspires one party with pride, and they assume the airs of conquerors; disappointment sours the minds of the other — and thus the contest ends in creating violent passions, which are always ready to enlist into every other cause. Such is the progress of party spirit; and a single question will often give rise to a party, that will continue for generations; and the same men or their adherents will continue to divide on other questions, that have not the remotest connection with the first point of contention.