http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2010\01\13\story_13-1-2010_pg3_4
Wednesday, January 13, 2010 PURPLE PATCH: Draconian laws -John Adams "Ignorance and inconsideration are the two great causes of the ruin of mankind" - this is an observation of Dr Tillotson, with relation to the interest of his fellow-men, in a future and immortal state. But it is of equal truth and importance, if applied to the happiness of men in society, on this side of the grave. In the earliest ages of the world, absolute Monarchy seems to have been the universal form of government. Kings, and a few of their great counsellors and captains, exercised a cruel tyranny over the people who held a rank in the scale of intelligence, in those days, but little higher than the camels and elephants, that carried them and their engines to war. By what causes it was brought to pass, that the people in the middle ages, became more intelligent in general, would not perhaps be possible in these days to discover. But the fact is certain, and wherever a general knowledge and sensibility have prevailed among the people, arbitrary government and every kind of oppression have lessened and disappeared in proportion. Man has certainly an exalted soul and the same principle in human nature; that aspiring noble principle, founded in benevolence and cherished by knowledge; I mean the love of power, which has been so often the cause of slavery, has, whenever freedom has existed, been the cause of freedom. If it is this principle, that has always prompted the princes and nobles of the earth, by every species of fraud and violence, to shake off all the limitations of their power; it is the same that has always stimulated the common people to aspire at independency, and to endeavour at confining the power of the great, within the limits of equity and reason. The poor people, it is true, have been much less successful than the great. They have seldom found either leisure or opportunity to form an union and exert their strength ignorant as they were of arts and letters, they have seldom been able to frame and support a regular opposition. This, however, has been known, by the great, to be the temper of mankind, and they have accordingly laboured, in all ages, to wrest from the populace, as they are contemptuously called, the knowledge of their rights and wrongs, and the power to assert the former or redress the latter. I say rights, for such they have, undoubtedly, antecedent to all earthly government. Rights that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws; rights, derived from the great Legislator of the universe. Since the promulgation of Christianity, the two greatest systems of tyranny, that have sprung from this original, are the cannon and the feudal law. The desire of dominion, that great principle by which we have attempted to account for so much good, and so much evil, is, when properly restrained, a very useful and noble movement in the human mind, but when such restraints are taken off, it becomes an encroaching, grasping, restless and ungovernable power. Numberless have been the systems of iniquity, contrived by the great, for the gratification of this passion in themselves, but in none of them were they ever more successful, than in the invention and establishment of the canon and the feudal law. By the former of these, the most refined, sublime, extensive, and astonishing constitution of policy, that ever was conceived by the mind of man, was framed by the Romish clergy for the aggrandisement of their own order. All the epithets I have here given to the Romish policy are just; and will be allowed to be so, when it is considered, that they even persuaded mankind to believe, faithfully and undoubtingly, that God Almighty had entrusted them with the keys of heaven, whose gates they might open and close at pleasure, with a power of dispensation over all the rules and obligations of morality, with authority to license all sorts of sins and crimes, with a power of deposing princes, and absolving subjects from allegiance, with a power of procuring or withholding the rain of heaven, and the beams of the sun, with the management of earthquakes, pestilence and famine. All these opinions they were enabled to spread and rivet among the people, by reducing their minds to a state of sordid ignorance and staring timidity; and by infusing into them a religious horror of letters and knowledge. There was another system which, although it was originally formed perhaps for the necessary defence of a barbarous people against the inroads and invasions of her neighbouring nations; yet, for the same purposes of tyranny, cruelty and lust, which had dictated the canon law, it was soon adopted by almost all the princes of Europe, and wrought into the constitutions of their government. It was originally a code of laws, for a vast army in a perpetual encampment. The general was invested with the sovereign propriety of all the lands within the territory. Of him, his servants and vassals, the first rank of his great officers held the lands; and in the same manner, the other subordinate officers held of them; and all ranks and degrees, held their lands, by a variety of duties and services, all tending to bind the chains the faster, on every order of mankind. In this manner, the common people were held together, in herds and clans, in a state of servile dependence on their lords; bound, even by the tenure of their lands to follow them, whenever they commanded, to their wars; and in a state of total ignorance of every thing divine and human, excepting the use of arms, and the culture of their lands. (This extract is taken from An Essay on Canon and Feudal Law by John Adams) John Adams was an American politician and the second President of the United States (1797-1801). He is regarded as one of the most influential Founding Fathers of the United States
<<20100113_ed04.jpg>>
