We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
BLUEPRINT FOR FREEDOM
9
And Madison replied classically, 'What is government after all, but the greatest of all reflections upon human nature?" He said, "If men were angels, no government would be necessary, and if governors were angels, no restrictions upon their power would be necessary." But, unfortunately, men are not angels, so we must have government, and governors ire not angels, God knows, so we must nem them in.
Then Madison added this, and here is what we have really forgotten. He said, "We have sta\ed the future of our American political institutions" not upon the power of government, Far from it. We have staked the future of our civilization "upon the :apacity of man\ind for self 'govern' ment."
SELF-GOVERNMENT— you say, well that means politics, voting. No. Madison meant what he said. Politics and voting are all right, but Madison said that the future of this rountry depended upon our capacity to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to restrain ourselves, under the Ten Commandments of the Creator. That is what self'government means.
In the United States where government is tied down, restrained and restricted, the individual citizen, in order to be worthy of the liberty that only a restrained government will permit, must grow in moral stature, selfrestraint, self-control, charity and morality, if you please. This is what Madison said was an indispensable prerequisite to the future of the United States. We have lost sight of that, too.
Here is the necessary complement to the restrictions upon government which our Constitutional system establishes. Self'government, by each and every individual, is essential if we are to keep the state restrained. One hundred years before the Declaration of Independence was written, William Penn, a pious Quaker down in Pennsylvania said this: "Those people who will not be governed by God will be ruled by tyrants." Penn was right. Those people who will not govern and restrain and control themselves under the moral laws of God will be controlled by a despot.
Go back and stand where William Penn stood in the wilderness of Pennsylvania, in the seventeenth century. Look back to Herod and forward to Hitler and Stalin. You see no exception to what Penn said because when personal self-control under God's Commandments goes out of the heart of any people, a vacuum is created which sucks in a tyrant who takes God's place. It will be so with us. It is being so with us, if you please. When the state swells, the people are shrinking. There is an inescapable ratio between the size of the citizen and the size of his government. Big government is for little people. Wherever you find big government invariably the people are 6mall.
It takes big self-controlled people to enjoy the luxury of small government. Our government was designed to be small and restrained and contained upon the presupposition that the American citizen would be Godfearing and self 'controlled; self-governed, in other words.