The U.S. Constitution was framed in large measure on the concepts developed by French philosopher Charles Louis Montesqueiu in his 1748 tome, “The Spirit of Laws.”
There is found the government divided into separate executive, legislative (two houses) and judicial branches with a system of checks and balances to prevent overreach from one to another.
It was intended as a model for French government, but the decline of France continued into the bloody 1789 revolution in which the ruling class went to the guillotine. The widely-read book was translated into several languages and made its way across the Atlantic.
Montesqueiu also wrote a treatise on the fall of Rome as due to a principal movement resulting from a complex of factors. He claimed as factors: the change of government from a republic to a dictatorship; the spread of servility among the masses; the desire of the poor to be supported by the state; the influx of aliens unformed by Roman traditions; the excess of taxation; the depreciation of currency; the failure of military discipline and general corruption of government administrators.
Were he alive today, the French philosopher would point to the several tenets of the current Socialist faction as elements of another principal movement portending social disaster.
Are we to be swept over the cataract to be dashed onto the rocks of reality far below or do we fight against the flow to reestablish a government of individual liberty? The next presidential election will determine our course.
Robin Strickland
Peachtree City, Ga.
