[CS-FSLUG] OT: A prophecy coming true, written in 1857.

[Fred A. Miller]

Letter written by Thomas Babington Macaulay in 1857

The Coming Crisis in America
Thomas Babington Macaulay

[This letter was written by Macaulay to Henry S. Randall,
the biographer of Jefferson. Upon reading the letter, U.S.
President Garfield said it startled him "like an alarm bell
at night."]

"I have long been convinced that institutions purely
democratic must sooner or later destroy liberty or
civilization, or both. You may think that your country
enjoys an exemption from these evils. I will frankly own to
you that I am of a very different opinion. Your fate I
believe to be settled, though it is deferred by a physical
cause. As long as you have a boundless extent of fertile and
unoccupied land, your laboring population will be far more
at ease than is the laboring population of the old world,
and while that is the case the Jefferson politics may
continue to exist without any fatal calamity. But the time
will come when wages will be as low and will fluctuate as
much with you as with us. You will have your Manchesters
and your Birminghams, and in these Manchesters and
Birminghams hundreds of thousands of artisans will assuredly
be out of work. Then your institutions will be brought to
the test. Distress everywhere makes the laborer mutinous
and discontented, and incline him to listen to agitators
who tell him that it is a monstrous iniquity that one man
should have a million while another cannot get a full meal.

"I have seen England pass through three or four such
critical seasons as I have described; through such seasons
the United States will have to pass in the course of the
next century, if not of this. How will you pass through
them? I heartily wish you a good deliverance. But my reason
and my wishes are at war, and I cannot help foreboding the
worst.

"The day will come when in the State of New York, a
multitude of people, none of whom has had more than half a
breakfast or expects to have more than half a dinner, will
choose a legislature. On one side is a statesman teaching
patience, respect for the vested rights, strict observance
of public faith. On the other is a demagogue, ranting at
the tyranny of capitalists and usurists, and asking why
anybody should be permitted to drink champagne and ride
in a carriage while thousands of honest people are in want
of necessities. Which of these candidates is likely to be
preferred by a working-man who hears his children cry for
bread?

"I seriously apprehend that you will, in some such season of
adversity as I have described, do things which will prevent
prosperity from returning. There will be, I fear,
spoliation. The spoliation will increase the distress. The
distress will produce fresh spoliation. There is nothing
to stop you. Your constitution is all sail and no anchor.

"As I said before, when society has entered on this downward
progress, either civilization or liberty must perish. Either
some Caesar or Napoleon will seize the reins of government
with a strong hand, and your republic will be as fearfully
plundered and laid to waste by the barbarians in the
twentieth century as the Roman Empire was in the fifth,
with the difference that the Huns and Vandals who ravaged
the Roman empire came from without; and that your Huns and
Vandals will have been engendered within your own country
by your own institutions."

-- 
The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other
people's money.
  -  Margaret Thatcher