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Showing posts from February, 2009

John Adams and the future of America

"We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." President John Adams spoke those words to America's military on October 11, 1798, fifteen years after the American Revolution officially ended. During the infancy of our nation and in the midst of a military expansion Adams expressed a prophetic concern about the nation he helped form. What perspectives solicited such comments from one of our founding fathers? I don't claim expertise in American History or the life of John Adams, but I will venture a hypothesis regarding Adam's perspective. The founders of our nation established a limited form of government in contrast to the British monarchy from which th