Wisdom from statesman Daniel Webster

Good Reads ^ | 1800s | Daniel Webster

[GoldenState_Rose]

“I apprehend no danger to our country from a foreign foe. Our destruction, should it come at all, will be from another quarter. From the inattention of the people to the concerns of their government, from their carelessness and negligence, I must confess that I do apprehend some danger. I fear that they may place too implicit a confidence in their public servants, and fail properly to scrutinize their conduct; that in this way they may be made the dupes of designing men, and become the instruments of their own undoing. Make them intelligent, and they will be vigilant; give them the means of detecting the wrong, and they will apply the remedy.”

― Daniel Webster

[GoldenState_Rose]

Let's remedy this dire situation!

[knarf]

He called The Bible, A Rich Supply Of Thought

[MUDDOG]

Make them intelligent

Ah, there's the rub.

[Salvavida]

Indeed.

[soycd]

Oh Danny Boy ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-j10BBT1mHs

[x]

I hear with distress and anguish the word “secession,” especially when it falls from the lips of those who are patriotic, and known to the country, and known all over the world, for their political services. Secession! Peaceable secession! Sir, your eyes and mine are never destined to see that miracle. The dismemberment of this vast country without convulsion! The breaking up of the fountains of the great deep without ruffling the surface! Who is so foolish, I beg everybody’s pardon, as to expect to see any such thing? Sir, he who sees these States, now revolving in harmony around a common centre, and expects to see them quit their places and fly off without convulsion, may look the next hour to see the heavenly bodies rush from their spheres, and jostle against each other in the realms of space, without causing the wreck of the universe. There can be no such thing as a peaceable secession. Peaceable secession is an utter impossibility. Is the great Constitution under which we live, covering this whole country, is it to be thawed and melted away by secession, as the snows on the mountain melt under the influence of a vernal sun, disappear almost unobserved, and run off? No, sir! No, sir! I will not state what might produce the disruption of the Union; but, sir, I see as plainly as I see the sun in heaven what that disruption itself must produce; I see that it must produce war, and such a war as I will not describe, in its twofold character.

Daniel Webster, March 7, 1850

[Intolerant in NJ]

From the inattention of the people to the concerns of their government, from their carelessness and negligence, I must confess that I do apprehend some danger...and "unaware and compliant" is just how 'rats like their voters, right Bill Ivey?.....

[Southside_Chicago_Republican]

Bookmark

[HiTech RedNeck]

Alas, alas, it is so possible to be very brilliantly FOOLISH.

This has nothing to do with intelligence, but rather wisdom.

[HiTech RedNeck]

And then Webster went on to declare that there would be no secession.

If the would-be Confederacy had been as wise as Webster, there wouldn’t have been. But rage overcame wisdom and even now smolders.

[MUDDOG]

even now smolders

Fergit haill!

[HiTech RedNeck]

And as long as the south is mad at the north (or what it had been over a century ago) then it can’t see what else there is to be glad about.