Showing posts with label England. Show all posts
Showing posts with label England. Show all posts

Thursday, December 18, 2014

Governor McAuliffe appoints Senator Mary Margaret Whipple to the Virginia Board of Health

Richmond – Today Governor McAuliffe appointed former Senator Mary Margaret Whipple to the Virginia Board of Health. Senator Whipple is currently employed as the Regional Director for Community and Member Outreach for the Virginia Hospital and Healthcare Association. Senator Whipple will fill the seat vacated by Eric Deaton, who resigned his seat on the board in order to take a position outside of Virginia.

Senator Mary Margaret Whipple, Virginia Board Health

Mary Margaret Whipple represented the 31st District in the Virginia State Senate from 1996 until her retirement in 2012. She chaired the Senate Rules Committee and, as Chair of the Senate Democratic Caucus, was the first woman ever to hold a leadership position in the Virginia General Assembly. In the Senate she served on several standing committees, including the Finance committee, as well as legislative commissions including the Virginia Housing Commission. While in the Senate, she was both a member and chair of the National Conference of State Legislatures’ Committee on the Environment. As a member of the Arlington County Board (1983–1995), she worked on transportation issues and served on the WMATA Board of Directors. A former instructor at Northern Virginia Community College, Mrs. Whipple was appointed to the Arlington County School Board in 1976, and was Chair in 1978. She is currently President of the Alliance for Housing Solutions; vice chair of the Virginia Women’s Monument Commission and a member of the Board of Trustees of the Arlington Community Foundation.

Wednesday, August 13, 2014

Undermining The Constitution A HISTORY OF LAWLESS GOVERNMENT (Part 11)

English: The Supreme Court of the United State...
English: The Supreme Court of the United States. Washington, D.C. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
By Thomas James Norton

THE NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS ACT OF 1935 WAS A VICTORY FOR CAESARISM OVER THE STATES AFTER A CONTINUOUS BATTLE FOR TWO DECADES
The most common disregard by Congress and the President of the Tenth Amendment, forbidding the Nation to usurp powers not granted to it, and especially to stay away from the governmental field of the States, has been in its persistent attempts, under the cloak of the Commerce Clause and of the General Welfare Clause, to invade the police field of the States -- for the protection and care of the health, safety, morals, education, and general well-being of the people -- and take jurisdiction of the liberties and living of men.
The Commerce Clause authorizes Congress "to regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several States" -- not within the States. The General Welfare Clause is discussed in another section. By NLRA Congress displaced a Union of States by a Nation
After half a century of notable failures and some burrowing successes, that invasion won completely through the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. By that act Con-
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gress usurped police control of all workers in the United States.
Could Hamilton have foreseen that, he would have been dumbfounded.
"I confess," he wrote in No. 17 of The Federalist, "I am at a loss to discover what temptation the persons intrusted with the administration of the General Government could ever feel to divest the States of the authorities of that description" -- legislation "for the individual citizens of America."
Briefly, the act declared an "emergency" to exist because of the "burdening" of commerce and the "obstructing" of it by strikes arising out of labor disputes; and, to keep the "flow" of commerce -- not alone interstate commerce covered by the Commerce Clause, but all commerce -- uninterrupted, it set up a Labor Board to which disputes between workers and employers should be taken for hearing and decision. As there could be no suspension of production by any strike that would not "affect" or "obstruct" both intrastate and interstate commerce at least a little, all workers and employers were thus brought under the Commerce Clause, written respecting interstate commerce only, as its language so plainly shows.
Before that only a small part of the workers of the country were within reach of Congress by virtue of the Commerce Clause -- those employed by railroad companies, telegraph and telephone companies, and aviation companies. The great body of them lived and worked subject to the police power of the States.
Representatives of the States in Congress, by passing the act, disparaged and diminished their commonwealths.


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By a complete about-face Supreme Court sustained Congress
Overriding its own decisions for half a century, on the powers of Congress over interstate commerce, and reversing the Judgments of four Circuit Courts of Appeals of three judges each, the Supreme Court of the United States, in an opinion by Chief Justice Hughes, Justices McReynolds, Van Devanter, Sutherland, and Butler dissenting, upheld (301 U. S. 1) on April 12, 1937, two months after the President proposed to "pack" the Court, and while the proposal was still before Congress, the National Labor Relations Act as a valid exercise of the granted power to Congress to regulate commerce "among the several States." The very title gives the lie to the strained recitations in the Act in a make-believe that it is a regulation of commerce and not a labor law. The promise was in those recitations that the operation of the Act would put an end to strikes and the disorders and losses which had attended them, which was not, of course, a subject of national jurisdiction.
Legislation had numerous precedents
The National Labor Relations Act had been preceded by many acts for the usurpation by Congress and the President of power over concerns of the States. The tyrannies spawned by the Labor Board in applying the National Labor Relations Act were a long time in coming.
When Franklin D. Roosevelt was Governor of New York, he protested in behalf of the States against the dishonest and lawless use of the Commerce Clause by Congress and the President to occupy forbidden ground in the States. Speaking on July 16, 1929, before a conference of governors at New London, Connecticut, he condemned the "stretching" of the Commerce Clause by Con-


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gress to cover cases not embraced by grants of power to it in the Constitution (italics inserted):
Governor Roosevelt declared against such legislation
"Our Nation has been a successful experiment in democratic government because the individual States have waived in only a few instances their sovereign rights. . . .
"But there is a tendency, and to my mind a grievous tendency, on the part of our National Government, to encroach, on one excuse or another, more and more upon State supremacy. The elastic theory of interstate commerce, for instance, has been stretched almost to the breaking point to cover certain regulatory powers desired by Washington. But in many cases this has been due to a failure of the States, themselves, by common agreement, to pass legislation necessary to meet certain conditions."
Importance of commerce in history
The Commerce Clause, for the strict observance of which Governor Roosevelt was rightly solicitous, contains a principle dating back as far as Magna Carta (1215), when King John, faced by armed men, signed an agreement not to interfere in the right of Englishmen to go to and fro in commerce, and abroad and return, except only in an exigency of war.
Englishmen in commerce were "in pursuit of happiness," which the Declaration of Independence later de-


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nominated a right from the Creator, for the protection of which "governments are instituted among men."
The speeches and writings of Edmund Burke in behalf of the American colonists make clear that the restrictions on commerce by the government of England were far more burdensome and intolerable than was "taxation without representation," usually given as the cause of the American Revolution. All products for sale had to go to England -- in English ships. All things that they had to buy they were obliged to buy in England -- for transportation in English ships. Raw material ready for manufacture had to go to England for that purpose. This interference with commerce (only one of many hard regulations) destroyed shipbuilding, which had become of great importance, put an end to manufacture, and cut off commercial communication with other countries.
Constitution designed to make commerce free
It was obstruction by States of this right to engage in commerce that contributed much to the breakdown of the government under the Articles of Confederation. And the third grant of power to Congress in the Constitution which followed (after taxing and borrowing) is "to regulate commerce . . . among the several States."
Congress is authorized to regulate commerce so that it will not be obstructed as it was before -- that is, it is to promote commerce. It is not to obstruct it affirmatively, any more than the early States could rightly do so, by legislation like the Norris-LaGuardia Law, which cripples men in commerce in the maintenance in court of their constitutional rights -- and their inherent rights. It is not to obstruct commerce negatively by failure to guard the


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rights of those engaged in it, as in the toleration of costly and destructive strikes.
Commerce most important activity of man
The history of commerce makes clear that legally it is the most important right of men, not to be trifled with by kings or others in power. Nevertheless, for a third of a century obstructions to commerce have been so nearly continuous as to condemn the Government at Washington for default of duty under the Commerce Clause.
Five years before the National Labor Relations Act of Congress, Governor Roosevelt condemned illicit ideas which he afterwards sanctioned as President. In a radio address in 1930 he again took up States' rights and home rule and said that with "a great number ... of vital problems of Government, such as the conduct of public utilities, of banks, of insurance companies, of agriculture, of education, of social welfare, and of a dozen other important features . . .Washington must not be encouraged to interfere." (Italics inserted.) But Roosevelt, like Supreme Court, did turn-around
With every one of those "features," Congress, taking orders from President Roosevelt, did interfere, to the denial of the liberty of man to engage unhampered by his Government or by his fellows in pursuits which had never before been regarded in the United States as subjects for political meddling. Never before regarded, because no fancy had ever found in the Constitution anything even suggesting the power in Congress to engage in or control such activities.


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Yet, during the first eleven years of the Act, from 1935 to 1945 inclusive, there were 37,383 work stoppages, involving 16,827,305 workers and the loss of wages for 175,896,235 man-days.
N.L.R.B. failed of purpose proclaimed
For the eleven years before the National Labor Relations Act, 1924 to 1934, inclusive, the work stoppages were 11,565, affecting 5,829,339 workers, about one-third of the number involved in stoppages during the 11 years following the Act.[1]
Even more deplorable than those losses to the workers was the brake put on production of food, clothing, housing, and other things required by a people in sore need, who had shown every willingness to do their part in the conduct of the war.
Many of those strikes were attended by the worst disorders, sometimes by bloodshed. Plants were seized by strikers and the owners excluded from them. Picketing was of the most violent sort.
Against those manifestations of lawlessness, which appeared in all parts of the country, the authorities of the States did nothing, or next to nothing. The United States looked on. There was generally a breakdown of law.
1. For the six years from 1940 to 1945, inclusive, covering the whole time of World War II, strikes took place as follows:
In 1940there were 2,508strikes
19414,288 
19422,968 
19433,752 
19444,956 
19454,750 
Total23,222 




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A picture of countrywide performances
What was going on all over the country all during the war is illustrated by this official statement of the Employment Relations Board of the State of Wisconsin, issued on December 27, 1946 (italics added):
"It can no longer be assumed, as it was when the first order of this board was made in May of this year, that the leadership of the organization now on strike intends to be law-abiding citizens.
"Events transpiring since the entry of the order and its enforcement by a judgment of the Circuit Court of Milwaukee County clearly indicate that the leadership of this union entertains no respect for the law, agencies designated to administer it, or the courts, but intends to prevent by any methods, legal or illegal, the use of the company's premises by the company, or the pursuit of work by employees of the company desiring to work."
Previous orders of the Board had been disregarded. As the quotation shows, the strike at the plant of Allis-Chalmers had been on since May preceding. All the powers of unionism had been concentrated on Allis-Chalmers to compel it to establish the closed shop and thereby deny to Americans the liberty to work under conditions of their own choosing.
Was the conduct described in Wisconsin treasonable?
The Constitution defines one of only two acts of "treason against the United States" as "adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort."


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Were not the unceasing strikes which were waged in essential industries from one end of the war to the other of great "aid and comfort" to Germany and Japan?
What did the Department of Justice of the United States do to protect the Government in its war endeavor and the American in his liberty?
Nothing.
Not until the head of the United Mine Workers notified the Secretary of the Interior, who was operating the coal mines under one of the many illegal seizures of property, without compensation, committed by Government during the war, that it would terminate its working agreement at midnight, November 20, 1946, did the United States show mettle befitting such an occasion. This time it had been put on the spot.
Government of great Republic driven to corner
The United States could not say that the duty to act was on the States, or use any other of the evasions which it had employed as encouragement to strikes against private industries. So it had its Department of Justice bring a suit on November 18 for injunction in the United States Court in the District of Columbia, which immediately issued an order restraining the head of the union and the miners from carrying out the notice. Nevertheless, a gradual walkout of miners began on November 18, and by November 20 "a full-blown strike was in progress," the Supreme Court said in sustaining the action of the trial judge in fining for contempt the head of the union $10,000 and the miners as a body $3,500,000. It authorized


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the reduction of the fine imposed on the miners to $700,000 on condition that they permanently obey the order of the court.
Simple case pointed way to managing labor disputes
That shows how nicely those disputes could be handled if Congress and the States (which have really fostered labor troubles) would remit them to the courts, where all other people having disputes are obliged to go. Congress does not interfere in controversies between individuals, or between corporations, or between corporations and individuals, or between States, or between associations of men. Why should it interfere in disputes between employee and employer?
The questions in dispute are justiciable (for the Judiciary) where negotiation or arbitration fails and the next step is the strike, with suspension of production for the needs of the people and the country, and disorder, sabotage, and personal peril. At that point society must assert its paramount interest, as it did in the instance just described, and require the adjudication of the dispute in its courts.
Labor decisions show courts afford remedy
Since the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in 1928 holding (262 U. S. 522) invalid a statute of Kansas setting up an Industrial Court to hear and decide controversies between employee and employer, including differences over wages, the interest of the public in the continuity of service has become more and more recognized. The National Labor Relations Act of July, 1935,


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brought all of the employees of the country within the Commerce Clause of the Constitution under the pretense that it was necessary to prevent strikes from interrupting the free flow of commerce to the discomfiture and damage of the people. And in 1934 the Supreme Court sustained (291 U. S. 502) a law of New York setting up a Milk Control Board to fix maximum and minimum prices for milk, thus taking away the right of the parties to contract. The welfare of the public and the interest of the Nation have been so grossly disregarded during the last two decades that views on "the liberty of contract," and on "the right to strike" and plunge society into confusion and distress, have undergone change. The act of the legislature of Kansas setting up the Industrial Court would probably be sustained today.[2]
Labor controversy has ceased to be personal to parties
When, for illustration, employment was on a small scale, the law was that an employee assumed the risk of injury by the carelessness of a fellow worker and he was therefore not entitled to damages from the employer. But as employment became stupendous, laws making the employer liable (as an operating cost) for injuries to a worker, whether there was negligence or not, were upheld by the courts as valid exercise of the police power of the States
2. Long after that part of the text was written, the Supreme Court of the United States, in an opinion rendered on January 3, 1949, sustaining a law of North Carolina and a constitutional provision of Nebraska forbidding employers to enter into contracts obligating themselves to exclude persons from employment because they are or are not members of labor unions, examined the case of the Industrial Court of Kansas and said that hours and wages can be fixed by law in the public interest. That fulfills the prophecy of the text.


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in the interest of society. So the controversy between employee and employer is no longer a matter exclusively personal to them.
Congress should get out of labor politics, in which it has too long performed a discreditable as well as an unconstitutional part. Government now conducted with respect to elections
The capers that have been cut at Washington during the last three decades make one wonder whether sight has been entirely lost of the purpose of Government as laid down in the Declaration of Independence, namely, to secure man against his fellows, and more especially against those whom he has chosen for his servants in public office. The activities of administrations have been plainly to favor, in view of the next election, great voting blocs like the labor organizations, the people on the farms (who, subsidized for years, turned the Presidential election in 1948), and the political bosses who "deliver" the votes of many corrupt cities. The platforms of both parties have offered shamelessly to "give every thing to every body" in those classes.
Meanwhile, the people, who set up Government "to secure these rights" which came to them from the Creator, "among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," are stripped of their possessions with a system of ruthlessness rarely exampled in the history of tyranny.
Although the Criminal Code of the United States provides that a fine of $100 and imprisonment for six months, or both, shall be imposed upon anyone who shall "knowingly and wilfully obstruct the passage of the mail," and


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although the opening of mail is severely punished, the Executive Department of the Government took no action respecting the obstructing and opening in 1937 of mail addressed to Americans engaged in their work and surrounded by pickets trying unlawfully to deny to them this liberty.
The nonaction by the Chief Executive, who is enjoined by the Constitution to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed," looked to the beholder like sanction of the illegalities.
Washington friendly to the sit-down strike
While the Government at Washington assumed to legislate by the National Labor Relations Act respecting all labor, regardless of whether it might be engaged in interstate commerce (of which only it has jurisdiction), a spokesman for the White House let it be known that sit-down strikes in various parts of the country, by which owners were forcibly dispossessed of their property by their employees, were matters of concern, not to the Nation, but to the States! As before indicated, the debilitated States generally concurred in such strikes.
The Secretary of Labor was reported by the Press to question at first whether the seizure and detention of plants by sit-down workers was illegal!
While employees of a steel manufactory at Canton, Ohio, were working under siege by an army of pickets, airplanes dropped leaflets to discourage the workers, saying, "Our members are well fed and happy. Relief is being arranged for their families. Four departments of the United States Government are fighting for our side."
On March 23, 1947, the Associated Press reported from


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Milwaukee that "the Allis-Chalmers strike, one of the most bloody and turbulent in recent history, ended today when the striking UAW-CIO Local 248 voted to return to work without a contract."
That shows that the workers themselves had tired of the long misleading by their officers.
Communism in strikes in United States
As the chief principle of the tactics of Communism is to provoke disorder and profit by it, the foregoing record, made mostly while the Republic was in the perils of war, compels the question whether Communist influences guided that disgrace to "government under law."
Earl Browder, for years head of the Communist Party in the United States, and twice a candidate for the Presidency of this Nation, reported to the Congress of the International Communist Party in Moscow on July 18, 1935:
"How was our party able to penetrate the masses and emerge from isolation? A great role was played by leaders in the strike movement and in the work of the party among the unemployed. In some of the most important strikes, the San Francisco general strike for one, the Communist Party had a decisive, determining influence."
And the great Government of the United States was not only unable to deport the alien who fomented and led that strike, but it also came around to issuing citizenship papers to him!
In What Is Communism? it is made clear (p. 163) by Browder, a native of the United States, that the plan of Communism is to take away liberty and property by armed force:
"The Revolution is carried out by the great masses of the


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toilers. The Communist Party, as the vanguard of the most conscious toilers, acts as their organizer and guide."
And again (pp. 164, 165):
"In the revolutionary situation the Communist Party . . . wins some of the armed forces to its side, and leads the effective majority of the population to the seizure of State power. . . . Above all, they need the armed forces."
An attempt to destroy an industry
Although not so wide in its reach to people as the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, the law of Congress of 1886, forty-nine years before (amended and extended in 1902), taxing oleomargarine ¼¢ a pound, and 10¢ a pound when colored, was fully as bad an invasion of the police field of the States. Agriculturists, a voting power, put the bills through Congress in protection of dairy butter. In addition to the destructive tax on the colored article (while colored butter was not taxed), the heavy license tax on manufacturers, on wholesalers, and on retailers, and the regulations regarding packing, labeling, and permits were obstructive and costly. The manufacturers abandoned coloring and left that to the consumers. Notwithstanding the handicap, oleomargarine grew steadily in favor. It was used in the navies of the world, including our own.
Those laws, attacked as intended to destroy an industry, as an encroachment upon the police field, and as working a deprivation of property without due process of law, were sustained (195 U. S. 27) in 1904 by the Supreme Court of the United States in an opinion by Justice White, with dissent by Chief Justice Fuller and Justices Brown and Peckham.
In 1888 the Supreme Court had upheld (127 U. S. 678)


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a law of Pennsylvania (1885) which forbade the making and selling of anything to be used as butter, or in lieu of it, out of any substance "other than unadulterated milk or cream." Justice Field dissented from the opinion written by Justice Harlan chiefly on the ground that the Court had lost the distinction between regulation and prohibition. To be sure, a State may regulate the manufacture of foods so as to secure purity and prevent fraud. But Pennsylvania had no more right or power to suppress the manufacture of oleomargarine, made and sold without deception, than it had to prevent the making of marmalade. Wide as the police power is, it must be exerted with regard for rationality, liberty, and the right to property.
Of the case arising in Pennsylvania, Judge Dillon, once on the Federal Bench, wrote in Municipal Corporations and also in Law and Jurisprudence in England and America this sound and complete comment:
"The record of the conviction of Powell for selling without any deception a healthful and nutritious article of food makes one's blood tingle."
If the police power of Pennsylvania could not extend that far, how could Congress, without any police power at all, get a seat in the game of politics?
In March, 1950, a discreditable record of 64 years was ended by Congress when it repealed the legislation by a vote of 202 to 106 in the House and 59 to 20 in the Senate.
The unbelievable guilelessness of the American
In all worlds of fabulists and fictionists no state of things is exhibited which is at once so preposterous and so potentially calamitous as that there should be tolerated a party


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against freedom and possessions in a land where the Constitution twice guarantees security to Liberty, Property, and Life!
Why have Senators and Representatives, who have been sent by the people of the States through the years to represent them in the Congress of the Union of States, failed to maintain their States in their constitutional position in that Union? They have made the State a kind of satrapy of the central power.
What Congressmen and Governors have done to sovereign States
The degraded position to which the States have descended in the estimation of our Government was shown by a meeting in 1944 in St. Louis of the governors of 26 States, who deplored the fact that for 11 years not a Governor had been called to the White House for consultation.[3]
When President Truman took office in 1945, the Republican members of Congress proceeded to the White House
3. The bill of particulars drawn by the governors proposed the resumption by the States of their constitutional functions. It condemned the acquisition by the United States of the lands of the States, the usurpation by Washington of unemployment insurance and unemployment services, the derogatory "conditions' fixed by the Federal Government to grants in aid of States for public works, the attempt of the Administration "to undermine and abandon our traditional National Guard," the entry of the United States into competition with insurance companies, the plans to control from the National Capital the field of medicine, the development of water resources without any recognition of the superior rights of the States, and some other acts of total indifference to the existence of local governments, as leaving for ten years "entire regions of our country" without "representation in the Cabinet or administrative agencies of the Federal Government." The crowning insolence was the failure of the President to invite any governor to the White House for an exchange of views.
Of course, the things complained of were brought about by the incompetence or delinquency of members of Congress from the States.


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to tell him that they would help him in all ways consistent with their political beliefs. On leaving the White House, the Republican leader in the Senate said to newsmen that he had not been on the premises since the party in power took office in 1933.
Well, the governors complaining at St. Louis were not heard in protest when the representatives of their States in Congress were originating or supporting bills for weakening their commonwealths and widening the authority of the National Government. And as for the treatment of members of Congress by the White House, they had let go of their constitutional reins.
At the 42nd annual convention of the governors of the States, at White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, on June 19, 1950, there was a quite general expression of the view that "Federal aid" should be relied upon by the States to carry their projects of flood control, reclamation, irrigation, electric power, and the like.
The presiding governor sought to prevent "stump speeches on the obligation Washington has in the development of the West." But the governor of California thought it "perfectly logical to ask the Federal Government for help in irrigation, reclamation, and power projects: we repay every cent and pay interest on Federal moneys going into such projects."
No one rose to inform him that the Constitution gives no authority to Congress to lend money at interest or otherwise for any purpose. Nor was he reminded that banks, and others having the right to lend, provided the necessary money for all great projects in the building of the United States from the beginning down.
The governor of New Jersey protested the proposal for


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Federal aid. He could not understand how any governor could "go on record for a balanced Federal budget and at the same time have his hand out for millions for reclamation, irrigation, and public power." He said that "New Jersey would have nothing to do with Washington, that it can and does finance its own projects, and at cheaper interest rates than the Federal Government can borrow money."
It is somewhat reassuring that one governor out of 48 had been sufficiently educated to declare for constitutional procedure.
The meeting of governors revealed the great need, not so much for "Federal aid," as for a school for giving constitutional instruction to the executives of the States. Such a school might accept members of Congress. Something must be done toward teaching those in office.
In the days of the horse and buggy
In the autobiography of Senator Hoar it is said that if any group went to the White House and brought back directions on policy, they would be made to regret it. For sixteen years or more the White House has been permitted by Congress to usurp direction of policy.
The States must back-track to where the writers of the Constitution set them -- or where they set themselves, for they made the Constitution.
And the schools must so teach the Constitution that governors of States will know better than to resign their great offices to take inferior seats in Congress.
And the President must be elected by the constitutional method.
When the States have exercised the power which they


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reserved to themselves by section 2 of Article I, to prescribe the qualifications of voters for members of Congress as well as for candidates for local offices, by making a certificate of graduation in the study of the principles of our constitutional system a condition of registering for voting, then we shall have a better situation in Congress and out.
And in the days ahead
And when the States have abolished the straight ticket by restoring or putting into effect the Australian ballot, which was emasculated for the aid of the illiterate followers of political leaders or bosses, then American elections will express the competence of the people for self-government.
And when the States have brought back the constitutional election of the President and put him in his place to stay, and thereby removed the need for Corrupt Practices Acts of Congress, our country will then be again "the land of the free."

The States, which intended when they wrote the Constitution to manage the country largely, should return to that duty.

From the great folks over at Barefoot's World.  

Wednesday, May 7, 2014

DECLARATION OF COLONIAL RIGHTS

RESOLUTIONS OF THE FIRST CONTINENTAL CONGRESS


OCTOBER 14, 1774 [1]
[Following the Boston Tea Party and the adoption of the Intolerable Acts, delegates gathered on September 5, 1774, at Philadelphia, in what was to become the First Continental Congress. Every colony but Georgia was represented. They voted on September 6 to appoint a committee "to state the rights of the Colonies in general, the several instances in which these rights are violated or infringed, and the means most proper to be pursued for obtaining a restoration of them" (Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774-1789, Washington, 1904, I, 26).
Joseph Galloway (173l -1803), a Philadelphia merchant and lawyer, led a conservative attempt to unite the colonies within the Empire. He had served as speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly from 1776 to 1774. In the war Galloway supported the British cause and after 1778 became spokesman for the Loyalists in England. In the First Continental Congress the more radical delegates thrust aside Galloway's proposal and on October 14 adopted instead, by unanimous action, the Declaration of Colonial Rights reproduced here. The first draft of these resolutions was written by Major John Sullivan (1740-95 ), delegate from New Hampshire, lawyer, major of the New Hampshire militia, major general in the Continental Army, judge, and eventually governor of his state.
Before they dissolved, on October 26, the members voted to meet again in the same city on May 10, 1775, "unless the redress of grievances ... be obtained before that time" (ibid., p. 102).]

The Congress met according to adjournment, and resuming the consideration of the subject under debate -- came into the following resolutions:
SULLIVAN'S DRAUGHT
... Whereas, since the close of the last war, the British Parliament, claiming a power of right to bind the people of America, by statute in all cases whatsoever, hath in some acts expressly imposed taxes on them, and in others, under various pretenses, but in fact for the purpose of raising a revenue, hath imposed rates and duties payable in these colonies, established a board of commissioners, with unconstitutional powers, and extended the jurisdiction of courts of admiralty, not only for collecting the said duties, but for the trial of causes merely arising within the body of a county.
And whereas, in consequence of other statutes, judges, who before held only estates at will in their offices, have been made dependent upon the crown alone for their salaries, and standing armies kept in times of peace:
And it has lately been resolved in Parliament, that by force of a statute, made in the thirty-fifth year of the reign of King Henry the Eighth, colonists may be transported to England, and tried there upon accusations for treasons, and misprisions, or concealments of treasons committed in the colonies; and by a late statute, such trials have been directed in cases therein mentioned.
And whereas, in the last session of Parliament, three statutes were made; one, entitled "An act to discontinue, in such manner and for such time as are therein mentioned, the landing and discharging, lading, or shipping of goods, wares and merchandise, at the town, and within the harbor of Boston, in the province of Massachusetts Bay, in North America"; another, entitled "An act for the better regulating the government of the province of the Massachusetts Bay in New England"; and another, entitled "An act for the impartial administration of justice, in the cases of persons questioned for any act done by them in the execution of the law, or for the suppression of riots and tumults, in the province of the Massachusetts Bay, in New England." And another statute was then made, "for making more effectual provision for the government of the province of Quebec, etc." All which statutes are impolitic, unjust, and cruel, as well as unconstitutional, and most dangerous and destructive of American rights.
And whereas, assemblies have been frequently dissolved, contrary to the rights of the people, when they attempted to deliberate on grievances; and their dutiful, humble, loyal, and reasonable petitions to the crown for redress have been repeatedly treated with contempt by His Majesty's ministers of state:
The good people of the several colonies of New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Newcastle, Kent and Sussex on Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina, justly alarmed at these arbitrary proceedings of Parliament and administration, have severally elected, constituted, and appointed deputies to meet and sit in General Congress, in the city of Philadelphia, in order to obtain such establishment, as that their religion, laws, and liberties may not be subverted:
Whereupon the deputies so appointed being now assembled, in a full and free representation of these colonies, taking into their most serious consideration, the best means of attaining the ends aforesaid, do, in the first place, as Englishmen, their ancestors in like cases have usually done, for asserting and vindicating their rights and liberties, declare,
That the inhabitants of the English Colonies in North America, by the immutable laws of nature, the principles of the English constitution, and the several charters or compacts, have the following rights:
Resolved, N.C.D. [2] 1. That they are entitled to life, liberty, and property, and they have never ceded to any sovereign power whatever, a right to dispose of either without their consent.
Resolved, N.C.D. 2. That our ancestors, who first settled these colonies, were, at the time of their emigration from the mother-country, entitled to all the rights, liberties, and immunities of free and natural-born subjects, within the realm of England.
Resolved, N.C.D. 3. That by such emigration they by no means forfeited, surrendered, or lost any of those rights, but that they were, and their descendants now are, entitled to the exercise and en joyment of all such of them, as their local and other circumstances enable them to exercise and enjoy.
Resolved, 4. That the foundation of English liberty, and of all free government, is a right in the people to participate in their legislative council: and as the English colonists are not represented, and from their local and other circumstances, cannot properly be represented in the British Parliament, they are entitled to a free and exclusive power of legislation in their several provincial legislatures, where their right of representation can alone be preserved, in all cases of taxation and internal polity, subject only to the negative of their sovereign, in such manner as has been heretofore used and accustomed. But, from the necessity of the case, and a regard to the mutual interest of both countries, we cheerfully consent to the operation of such acts of the British Parliament, as are bona fide, restrained to the regulation of our external commerce, for the purpose of securing the commercial advantages of the whole empire to the mother-country, and the commercial benefits of its respective members; excluding every idea of taxation, internal or external, for raising a revenue on the subjects in America, without their consent.
Resolved, N.C.D. 5. That the respective colonies are entitled to the common law of England, and more especially to the great and inestimable privilege of being tried by their peers of the vicinage, according to the course of that law.
Resolved, 6. That they are entitled to the benefit of such of the English statutes as existed at the time of their colonization; and which they have, by experience, respectively found to be applicable to their several local and other circumstances.
Resolved, N.C.D. 7. That these His Majesty's colonies, are likewise entitled to all the immunities and privileges granted and confirmed to them by royal charters, or secured by their several codes of provincial laws.
Resolved, N.C.D. 8. That they have a right peaceably to assemble, consider of their grievances, and petition the king; and that all prosecutions, prohibitory proclamations, and commitments for the same are illegal.
Resolved, N.C.D. 9. That the keeping a standing army in these colonies, in times of peace, without the consent of the legislature of that colony, in which such army is kept, is against law.
Resolved, N.C.D. 10. It is indispensably necessary to good government, and rendered essential by the English constitution, that the constituent branches of the legislature be independent of each other; that, therefore, the exercise of the legislative power in several colonies, by a council appointed, during pleasure, by the crown, is unconstitutional, dangerous, and destructive to the freedom of American legislation.
All and each of which the aforesaid deputies, in behalf of themselves and their constituents, do claim, demand, and insist on, as their indubitable rights and liberties; which cannot be legally taken from them, altered or abridged by any power whatever, without their own consent, by their representatives in their several provincial legislatures.
In the course of our inquiry, we find many infringements and violations of the foregoing rights, which, from an ardent desire, that harmony and mutual intercourse of affection and interest may be restored, we pass over for the present, and proceed to state such acts and measures as have been adopted since the last war, which demonstrate a system formed to enslave America.
Resolved, N.C.D. That the following acts of Parliament are infringements and violations of the rights of the colonists; and that the repeal of them is essentially necessary in order to restore harmony between Great Britain and the American colonies, viz.:
The several acts of 4 Geo. 3, ch. 15, and ch. 34. -- 5 Geo. 3, ch. 25. -- 6 Geo. 3, ch. 52. -- 7 Geo. 3, ch. 41, and ch. 46. -- 8 Geo. 3, ch. 22, which impose duties for the purpose of raising a revenue in America, extend the powers of the admiralty courts beyond their ancient limits, deprive the American subject of trial by jury, authorize the judges' certificate to indemnify the prosecutor from damages, that he might otherwise be liable to, requiring oppressive security from a claimant of ships and goods seized, before he shall be allowed to defend his property, and are subversive of American rights.
Also the 12 Geo. 3, ch. 24, entitled "An act for the better securing His Majesty's dockyards, magazines, ships, ammunition, and stores," which declares a new offense in America, and deprives the American subject of a constitutional trial by a jury of the vicinage, by authorizing the trial of any person, charged with the committing any offense described in the said act, out of the realm, to be indicted and tried for the same in any shire or county within the realm.
Also the three acts passed in the last session of Parliament, for stopping the port and blocking up the harbor of Boston, for altering the charter and government of the Massachusetts Bay, and that which is entitled "An act for the better administration of justice," etc.
Also the act passed in the same session for establishing the Roman Catholic religion in the Province of Quebec, abolishing the equitable system of English laws, and erecting a tyranny there, to the great danger, from so total a dissimilarity of religion, law, and government of the neighboring British colonies, by the assistance of whose blood and treasure the said country was conquered from France.
Also the act passed in the same session for the better providing suitable quarters for officers and soldiers in His Majesty's service in North America.
Also, that the keeping a standing army in several of these colonies, in time of peace, without the consent of the legislature of that colony in which such army is kept, is against law.
To these grievous acts and measures, Americans cannot submit, but in hopes that their fellow-subjects in Great Britain will, on a revision of them, restore us to that state in which both countries found happiness and prosperity, we have for the present only resolved to pursue the following peaceable measures:
Resolved, unanimously, That from and after the first day of December next, there be no importation into British America, from Great Britain or Ireland of any goods, wares or merchandise whatsoever, or from any other place of any such goods, wares or merchandise. [3]
1st. To enter into a nonimportation, nonconsumption, and nonexportation agreement or association.
2. To prepare an address to the people of Great Britain, and a memorial to the inhabitants of British America, and
3. To prepare a loyal address to His Majesty; agreeable to resolutions already entered into.
____________
1. Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774-1789 (Washington, 1904), I, 63-73.
2. I.e., nemine contradicente, meaning without a dissenting vote or unanimously. Commenting on these proceedings before a committee of the British House of Commons, in June, 1779, Galloway stated that, although the resolutions were recorded as having been passed unanimously, this meant not that they were approved by every member present but by a majority of each delegation (The Examination of Joseph Galloway ... before the House of Commons ... , 2d ed.; London, 1780, p. 61).
3. This paragraph was struck out.


The End.
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Wednesday, April 16, 2014

A GAME OF ENGLISH HISTORY

"Doktor Schnabel von Rom" ("Doc...
"Doktor Schnabel von Rom" ("Doctor Beak from Rome") engraving, Rome 1656 Physician attire for protection from the Bubonic plague or Black death. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
THEY sat around a small table, half a dozen bright boys and girls. Questions and answers flew back and forth, literally, for were they not printed upon slips of pasteboard which were handed about with exceeding rapidity? Upon listening carefully, it was discoverable that they were playing a game of English history.
Mr. Dalton, the father of the boy who was the host of the evening, stood behind his son's chair looking on and smiling at their eagerness. Presently he said, during a pause in the game;
"Well, boys, you do well; you certainly have a number of interesting facts and dates fastened in your memories, but it occurs to me to wonder if you know anything more than the mere fact. For instance, take this question which is the first that comes to mind, 'What two remarkable events in the reign of Charles the Second?' and the answer, 'The Great Plague and Fire in London.' Now what more do you know of those events?"
Fred Dalton looked up quickly. "I know a little about the Fire, but I do not know about the Plague. I suppose that there was a sort of epidemic raged in London at that time."
"And it must have raged extensively or it would not have been called the Great Plague, and have got into history," said Will Ely.
"You are both very good at supposing," said Mr. Dalton, laughing, "but it is sometimes better to know about a thing than to guess at it."
"I have read an account of the Plague," said Fred Smith. "It raged several months, all one summer, and one third of the people of the city died. Great numbers fled from the city, and so many died that they could not have any burial service, but just buried them in a great pit in the night. They built great bonfires in the streets hoping that the fire and smoke would prevent the spread of the disease, but heavy rains put out the fires. It was a dreadful time!"
"Indeed it was," said Mr. Dalton; "the accounts of it are harrowing. And now what do you know of the Great Fire, Fred?"
"I know that it started in a baker's shop near London Bridge, and that it burned over about five sixths of the city. It burned three days[300] and nights. It was in September, after a very hot and dry summer, so that the houses built of wood were in a well-seasoned state, and made first-rate kindling wood. And then there was a wind that fanned the fire and carried sparks and cinders a long distance, so that new fires kept breaking out in different parts of the city. It is said that there were two hundred thousand people who lost their homes, and that the streets leading out of the city were barricaded with broken-down wagons which the people flying from the fire had overloaded with their goods."
"It was a terrible calamity," said Mr. Dalton; "but like many another it proved a blessing, for the new London was much better built."
"Was the fire set by bad men, or was it an accident?" asked one of the boys.
"Without doubt it was set accidentally, though many people thought otherwise. A monument was erected near the place where the fire started in memory of those who lost their lives in that terrible time, and there was an inscription upon the monument charging the Papists with the crime, but this unjust accusation was afterwards removed by the order of the public authorities. But I will not hinder your game any longer."
"We like this sort of hindering," said one of the boys. "It makes it more interesting."
Mr. Dalton soon returned to say, "Boys, there is a 'Great Fire' in the kitchen, and a pan of corn waiting to be popped, and a Bridget there who does not think boys a 'Great Plague.'"
In less than half a minute there were no boys sitting around that table!
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Friday, March 28, 2014

Maxims for Revolutionists by George Bernard Shaw

The 1596 Book of Common Prayer
The 1596 Book of Common Prayer (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Or The ramblings of a fool.

THE GOLDEN RULE

Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.
Never resist temptation: prove all things: hold fast that which is good.
Do not love your neighbor as yourself. If you are on good terms with yourself it is an impertinence: if on bad, an injury.
The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.

IDOLATRY

The art of government is the organization of idolatry.
The bureaucracy consists of functionaries; the aristocracy, of idols; the democracy, of idolaters.
The populace cannot understand the bureaucracy: it can only worship the national idols.
The savage bows down to idols of wood and stone: the civilized man to idols of flesh and blood.
A limited monarchy is a device for combining the inertia of a wooden idol with the credibility of a flesh and blood one.
When the wooden idol does not answer the peasant's prayer, he beats it: when the flesh and blood idol does not satisfy the civilized man, he cuts its head off.
He who slays a king and he who dies for him are alike idolaters.

ROYALTY

Kings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination. When the process is interrupted by adversity at a critical age, as in the case of Charles II, the subject becomes sane and never completely recovers his kingliness.
The Court is the servant's hall of the sovereign.
Vulgarity in a king flatters the majority of the nation.
The flunkeyism propagated by the throne is the price we pay for its political convenience.

DEMOCRACY

If the lesser mind could measure the greater as a foot-rule can measure a pyramid, there would be finality in universal suffrage. As it is, the political problem remains unsolved.
Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
Democratic republics can no more dispense with national idols than monarchies with public functionaries.
Government presents only one problem: the discovery of a trustworthy anthropometric method.

IMPERIALISM

Excess of insularity makes a Briton an Imperialist.
Excess of local self-assertion makes a colonist an Imperialist.
A colonial Imperialist is one who raises colonial troops, equips a colonial squadron, claims a Federal Parliament sending its measures to the Throne instead of to the Colonial Office, and, being finally brought by this means into insoluble conflict with the insular British Imperialist, "cuts the painter" and breaks up the Empire.

LIBERTY AND EQUALITY

He who confuses political liberty with freedom and political equality with similarity has never thought for five minutes about either.
Nothing can be unconditional: consequently nothing can be free.
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
The duke inquires contemptuously whether his gamekeeper is the equal of the Astronomer Royal; but he insists that they shall both be hanged equally if they murder him.
The notion that the colonel need be a better man than the private is as confused as the notion that the keystone need be stronger than the coping stone.
Where equality is undisputed, so also is subordination.
Equality is fundamental in every department of social organization.
The relation of superior to inferior excludes good manners.

EDUCATION

When a man teaches something he does not know to somebody else who has no aptitude for it, and gives him a certificate of proficiency, the latter has completed the education of a gentleman.
A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.
The best brought-up children are those who have seen their parents as they are. Hypocrisy is not the parent's first duty.
The vilest abortionist is he who attempts to mould a child's character.
At the University every great treatise is postponed until its author attains impartial judgment and perfect knowledge. If a horse could wait as long for its shoes and would pay for them in advance, our blacksmiths would all be college dons.
He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.
A learned man is an idler who kills time with study. Beware of his false knowledge: it is more dangerous than ignorance.
Activity is the only road to knowledge.
Every fool believes what his teachers tell him, and calls his credulity science or morality as confidently as his father called it divine revelation.
No man fully capable of his own language ever masters another.
No man can be a pure specialist without being in the strict sense an idiot.
Do not give your children moral and religious instruction unless you are quite sure they will not take it too seriously. Better be the mother of Henri Quatre and Nell Gwynne than of Robespierre and Queen Mary Tudor.

MARRIAGE

Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.
Marriage is the only legal contract which abrogates as between the parties all the laws that safeguard the particular relation to which it refers.
The essential function of marriage is the continuance of the race, as stated in the Book of Common Prayer.
The accidental function of marriage is the gratification of the amoristic sentiment of mankind.
The artificial sterilization of marriage makes it possible for marriage to fulfill its accidental function whilst neglecting its essential one.
The most revolutionary invention of the XIX century was the artificial sterilization of marriage.
Any marriage system which condemns a majority of the population to celibacy will be violently wrecked on the pretext that it outrages morality.
Polygamy, when tried under modern democratic conditions, as by the Mormons, is wrecked by the revolt of the mass of inferior men who are condemned to celibacy by it; for the maternal instinct leads a woman to prefer a tenth share in a first rate man to the exclusive possession of a third rate one. Polyandry has not been tried under these conditions.
The minimum of national celibacy (ascertained by dividing the number of males in the community by the number of females, and taking the quotient as the number of wives or husbands permitted to each person) is secured in England (where the quotient is 1) by the institution of monogamy.
The modern sentimental term for the national minimum of celibacy is
Purity.
Marriage, or any other form of promiscuous amoristic monogamy, is fatal to large States because it puts its ban on the deliberate breeding of man as a political animal.

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

All scoundrelism is summed up in the phrase "Que Messieurs les Assassins commencent!"
The man who has graduated from the flogging block at Eton to the bench from which he sentences the garotter to be flogged is the same social product as the garotter who has been kicked by his father and cuffed by his mother until he has grown strong enough to throttle and rob the rich citizen whose money he desires.
Imprisonment is as irrevocable as death.
Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men.
The assassin Czolgosz made President McKinley a hero by assassinating him. The United States of America made Czolgosz a hero by the same process.
Assassination on the scaffold is the worst form of assassination, because there it is invested with the approval of society.
It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their kind.
Crime is only the retail department of what, in wholesale, we call penal law.
When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport: when the tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity. The distinction between Crime and Justice is no greater.
Whilst we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.
It is not necessary to replace a guillotined criminal: it is necessary to replace a guillotined social system.

TITLES

Titles distinguish the mediocre, embarrass the superior, and are disgraced by the inferior.
Great men refuse titles because they are jealous of them.

HONOR

There are no perfectly honorable men; but every true man has one main point of honor and a few minor ones.
You cannot believe in honor until you have achieved it. Better keep yourself clean and bright: you are the window through which you must see the world.
Your word can never be as good as your bond, because your memory can never be as trustworthy as your honor.

PROPERTY

Property, said Proudhon, is theft. This is the only perfect truism that has been uttered on the subject.

SERVANTS

When domestic servants are treated as human beings it is not worth while to keep them.
The relation of master and servant is advantageous only to masters who do not scruple to abuse their authority, and to servants who do not scruple to abuse their trust.
The perfect servant, when his master makes humane advances to him, feels that his existence is threatened, and hastens to change his place.
Masters and servants are both tyrannical; but the masters are the more dependent of the two.
A man enjoys what he uses, not what his servants use.
Man is the only animal which esteems itself rich in proportion to the number and voracity of its parasites.
Ladies and gentlemen are permitted to have friends in the kennel, but not in the kitchen.
Domestic servants, by making spoiled children of their masters, are forced to intimidate them in order to be able to live with them.
In a slave state, the slaves rule: in Mayfair, the tradesman rules.

HOW TO BEAT CHILDREN

If you strike a child, take care that you strike it in anger, even at the risk of maiming it for life. A blow in cold blood neither can nor should be forgiven.
If you beat children for pleasure, avow your object frankly, and play the game according to the rules, as a foxhunter does; and you will do comparatively little harm. No foxhunter is such a cad as to pretend that he hunts the fox to teach it not to steal chickens, or that he suffers more acutely than the fox at the death. Remember that even in childbeating there is the sportsman's way and the cad's way.

RELIGION

Beware of the man whose god is in the skies.
What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts.

VIRTUES AND VICES

No specific virtue or vice in a man implies the existence of any other specific virtue or vice in him, however closely the imagination may associate them.
Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.
Self-denial is not a virtue: it is only the effect of prudence on rascality.
Obedience simulates subordination as fear of the police simulates honesty.
Disobedience, the rarest and most courageous of the virtues, is seldom distinguished from neglect, the laziest and commonest of the vices.
Vice is waste of life. Poverty, obedience, and celibacy are the canonical vices.
Economy is the art of making the most of life.
The love of economy is the root of all virtue.

FAIRPLAY

The love of fairplay is a spectator's virtue, not a principal's.

GREATNESS

Greatness is only one of the sensations of littleness.
In heaven an angel is nobody in particular.
Greatness is the secular name for Divinity: both mean simply what lies beyond us.
If a great man could make us understand him, we should hang him.
We admit that when the divinity we worshipped made itself visible and comprehensible we crucified it.
To a mathematician the eleventh means only a single unit: to the bushman who cannot count further than his ten fingers it is an incalculable myriad.
The difference between the shallowest routineer and the deepest thinker appears, to the latter, trifling; to the former, infinite.
In a stupid nation the man of genius becomes a god: everybody worships him and nobody does his will.

BEAUTY AND HAPPINESS, ART AND RICHES

Happiness and Beauty are by-products.
Folly is the direct pursuit of Happiness and Beauty.
Riches and Art are spurious receipts for the production of Happiness and
Beauty.
He who desires a lifetime of happiness with a beautiful woman desires to enjoy the taste of wine by keeping his mouth always full of it.
The most intolerable pain is produced by prolonging the keenest pleasure.
The man with toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.
The more a man possesses over and above what he uses, the more careworn he becomes.
The tyranny that forbids you to make the road with pick and shovel is worse than that which prevents you from lolling along it in a carriage and pair.
In an ugly and unhappy world the richest man can purchase nothing but ugliness and unhappiness.
In his efforts to escape from ugliness and unhappiness the rich man intensifies both. Every new yard of West End creates a new acre of East End.
The XIX century was the Age of Faith in Fine Art. The results are before us.

THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN

The fatal reservation of the gentleman is that he sacrifices everything to his honor except his gentility.
A gentleman of our days is one who has money enough to do what every fool would do if he could afford it: that is, consume without producing.
The true diagnostic of modern gentility is parasitism.
No elaboration of physical or moral accomplishment can atone for the sin of parasitism.
A modern gentleman is necessarily the enemy of his country. Even in war he does not fight to defend it, but to prevent his power of preying on it from passing to a foreigner. Such combatants are patriots in the same sense as two dogs fighting for a bone are lovers of animals.
The North American Indian was a type of the sportsman warrior gentleman. The Periclean Athenian was a type of the intellectually and artistically cultivated gentleman. Both were political failures. The modern gentleman, without the hardihood of the one or the culture of the other, has the appetite of both put together. He will not succeed where they failed.
He who believes in education, criminal law, and sport, needs only property to make him a perfect modern gentleman.

MODERATION

Moderation is never applauded for its own sake.
A moderately honest man with a moderately faithful wife, moderate drinkers both, in a moderately healthy house: that is the true middle class unit.

THE UNCONSCIOUS SELF

The unconscious self is the real genius. Your breathing goes wrong the moment your conscious self meddles with it.
Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.

REASON

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
The man who listens to Reason is lost: Reason enslaves all whose minds are not strong enough to master her.

DECENCY

Decency is Indecency's Conspiracy of Silence.

EXPERIENCE

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.
If we could learn from mere experience, the stones of London would be wiser than its wisest men.

TIME'S REVENGES

Those whom we called brutes had their revenge when Darwin shewed us that they are our cousins.
The thieves had their revenge when Marx convicted the bourgeoisie of theft.

GOOD INTENTIONS

Hell is paved with good intentions, not with bad ones.
All men mean well.

NATURAL RIGHTS

The Master of Arts, by proving that no man has any natural rights, compels himself to take his own for granted.
The right to live is abused whenever it is not constantly challenged.

FAUTE DE MIEUX

In my childhood I demurred to the description of a certain young lady as "the pretty Miss So and So." My aunt rebuked me by saying "Remember always that the least plain sister is the family beauty."
No age or condition is without its heroes. The least incapable general in a nation is its Cæsar, the least imbecile statesman its Solon, the least confused thinker its Socrates, the least commonplace poet its Shakespear.

CHARITY

Charity is the most mischievous sort of pruriency.
Those who minister to poverty and disease are accomplices in the two worst of all the crimes.
He who gives money he has not earned is generous with other people's labor.
Every genuinely benevolent person loathes almsgiving and mendicity.

FAME

Life levels all men: death reveals the eminent.

DISCIPLINE

Mutiny Acts are needed only by officers who command without authority.
Divine right needs no whip.

WOMEN IN THE HOME

Home is the girl's prison and the woman's workhouse.

CIVILIZATION

Civilization is a disease produced by the practice of building societies with rotten material.
Those who admire modern civilization usually identify it with the steam engine and the electric telegraph.
Those who understand the steam engine and the electric telegraph spend their lives in trying to replace them with something better.
The imagination cannot conceive a viler criminal than he who should build another London like the present one, nor a greater benefactor than he who should destroy it.

GAMBLING

The most popular method of distributing wealth is the method of the roulette table.
The roulette table pays nobody except him that keeps it. Nevertheless a passion for gaming is common, though a passion for keeping roulette tables is unknown.
Gambling promises the poor what Property performs for the rich: that is why the bishops dare not denounce it fundamentally.

THE SOCIAL QUESTION

Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty: what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.

STRAY SAYINGS

We are told that when Jehovah created the world he saw that it was good.
What would he say now?
The conversion of a savage to Christianity is the conversion of
Christianity to savagery.
No man dares say so much of what he thinks as to appear to himself an extremist.
Mens sana in corpore sano is a foolish saying. The sound body is a product of the sound mind.
Decadence can find agents only when it wears the mask of progress.
In moments of progress the noble succeed, because things are going their way: in moments of decadence the base succeed for the same reason: hence the world is never without the exhilaration of contemporary success.
The reformer for whom the world is not good enough finds himself shoulder to shoulder with him that is not good enough for the world.
Every man over forty is a scoundrel.
Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing: age, which forgives itself everything, is forgiven nothing.
When we learn to sing that Britons never will be masters we shall make an end of slavery.
Do not mistake your objection to defeat for an objection to fighting, your objection to being a slave for an objection to slavery, your objection to not being as rich as your neighbor for an objection to poverty. The cowardly, the insubordinate, and the envious share your objections.
Take care to get what you like or you will be forced to like what you get. Where there is no ventilation fresh air is declared unwholesome. Where there is no religion hypocrisy becomes good taste. Where there is no knowledge ignorance calls itself science.
If the wicked flourish and the fittest survive, Nature must be the God of rascals.
If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience!
Compassion is the fellow-feeling of the unsound.
Those who understand evil pardon it: those who resent it destroy it.
Acquired notions of propriety are stronger than natural instincts. It is easier to recruit for monasteries and convents than to induce an Arab woman to uncover her mouth in public, or a British officer to walk through Bond Street in a golfing cap on an afternoon in May.
It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.
The Chinese tame fowls by clipping their wings, and women by deforming their feet. A petticoat round the ankles serves equally well.
Political Economy and Social Economy are amusing intellectual games; but
Vital Economy is the Philosopher Stone.
When a heretic wishes to avoid martyrdom he speaks of "Orthodoxy, True and False" and demonstrates that the True is his heresy.
Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself.
If you injure your neighbor, better not do it by halves.
Sentimentality is the error of supposing that quarter can be given or taken in moral conflicts.
Two starving men cannot be twice as hungry as one; but two rascals can be ten times as vicious as one.
Make your cross your crutch; but when you see another man do it, beware of him.

SELF-SACRIFICE

Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.
If you begin by sacrificing yourself to those you love, you will end by hating those to whom you have sacrificed yourself.

THE END


Our Notes:  George Bernard Shaw was a member of the Fabian Society.  An order of nihilistic socialists who's works we are seeing come to completion in this day and age.   The Fabians were self confessed Anarchists.  A group who despised freedom and religion except their own religion which consisted of the worship of demons and Lucifer from what we have traced.  Above in the writings of George Bernard Shaw are not words of wisdom, but instead nihilistic filth designed to defile the minds of men.
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