|
|
MACAULAY ON DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENT
On Party Politics
The effect of violent animosities between parties has always been an indifference to the general welfare and honor of the State. A politician, where factions run high, is interested not for the whole people, but for his own section of it. The rest are, in his view, strangers, enemies, or rather pirates. The strongest aversion which he can feel to any foreign power is the ardor of friendship, when compared with the loathing which he entertains towards those domestic foes with whom he is cooped up in narrow space, with whom he lives in a constant interchange of petty injuries and insults, and from whom, in the day of their success, he has to expect severities far beyond any that a conqueror from a distant country would inflict.--from "Hallam"
The feeling of patriotism, when society is in a healthful state, springs up, by a natural and inevitable association, in the minds of citizens who know that they owe all their comforts and pleasures to the bond which unties them in one community. But under a partial and oppressive government, these associations cannot acquire that strength which they have in a better state of things. Men are compelled to seek from their party that protection which they ought to receive from their country, and they, by a natural consequence, transfer to their party that affection which they would otherwise have felt for their country.--from "Civil Disabilities of the Jews"
| Previous | Front Page | Next |