Tea at Trianon: Why The Constitution Is Still Important

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, September 20, 2019

Why The Constitution Is Still Important

From Andrew Klavan:

It's interesting to remember, for instance, that the Constitution was the Founders’ attempt to replace the Articles of Confederation, the 1781 document that reflected the determination of the original states to preserve their sovereignty and independence. The problem was [that] the Articles of Confederation — the "AOC," as it was called before that became an insulting term for a bobble-headed dingbat — did not give Congress enough power to hold the states together as a single nation.

So the Founders went back to the drawing board and brought out the Constitution. The states were so wary of giving the federal government even more power that a long debate ensued in which both sides argued for and against the new document. That was how we got The Federalist Papers, which gathered the arguments for the Constitution as made by John Jay and James Madison ... and Alexander Hamilton, before he embarked on his legendary career as a rapper. (Read more.)