2013-10-29

Throwing all into confusion

Considering the mischief caused by Tea-Party Republican representatives, and the resulting confusion about how to end the shutdown, here is Rawlins Lowndes’s realistic view of the proposed US  constitution of 1787, as collected in the Anti-Federalist Papers (54):
Great stress was laid on the admirable checks which guarded us, under the new Constitution, from the encroachments of tyranny; but too many checks in a political machine must produce the same mischief as in a mechanical one – that of throwing all into confusion. [1]
Lowndes was trying to protect slavery in South Carolina against those in the Northern States, those who would try to do away with that peculiar institution: affirming that “whilst there remained one acre of swampland in South Carolina, he should raise his voice against restricting the importation of Negroes.” He was a pragmatist.