I am blessed to have received copies of your mighty correspondence. You are attempting to lay a right foundation, knowing that a house cannot endure violent storms except it be set upon a sound foundation. What, then, is the foundation of which we specifically speak? If it is a subordinate document, perhaps it is being misunderstood unintentionally; perhaps a subtle textual error could be corrected. Or is the difficulty perhaps organic? What is the basis of our government? Is it our Constitution? Yes. Upon what, then, is our Constitution based? Is it based upon an idea - or indeed a set of interrelated ideas? Yes, but in a word, what is the lodestar for these ideas? Is it not man? Yes. Then is not the foundation of the document ultimately both man himself, and principles concerning man? Yes. In a word, do those principles have generally or universally intended applicability?

Thank you for your comments. I am in concurrence that ultimately the foundation of civic governance, whether it be of a republican or a tyrannical sort, blossoms forth from the very character of men. I contend that it is axiomatic that in order for a man to be free, he must first be good. That we are not good is plain enough for us to see. We do not need even to believe in the literal fall of Adam to know intuitively and by observation that man is usually not too far along from the mad cry of beasts (though the Genesis account reveals that the fall of man first and foremost involves a rupture in his relationship with God, of Adam from God, and more interestingly for this discussion of God from Adam - i.e. Psalm 22). Since we are not good, we are not free - not free from our sinful passions, and thus not free to be totally self-governing (hence the necessity of laws, to restrain government from abrogation of our liberties, but also to restrain ourselves from our own excesses). This belies the very conceit of the strict libertarian, who is really just a modern day antinomian; for him, there is no necessity in law per se, thus everything can and should be amenable to the whims of a majority (while hypocritically they also contend that the "individual" man may be free at all times from the reproaches of that same majority, if and when that man does not concur). It is thus clear that, arising from the very character of men, we not only need government, as contrary to the conceits of the antinomian crowd, but we need that government which in its philosophical foundations and framework is most conducive to habitually good behavior by at least a large segment of the populace (so that in time at least some of these in turn may obtain to some level of virtue and pass the same onto their children). What government is so conducive? As Richard Sutter has said elsewhere, that which is most clearly aligned with and supportive of personal and collective piety, because the pious man (and the pious culture) will be more likely than the impious one to habitually good behaviors and thus real, sustained virtue. We have seen furthermore that republics are most conducive to this goal, since tyrannies invariably arise from and attempt to expand upon a certain manifestation of gnosticism, whether it be the "gnosis" unique to a "divine right of kings" or the "gnosis" in a pseudo-divine "oracle" such as Adolph Hitler. The republic, rather than the truncated colony or the presumptuous empire, is in its middle state the very expression of piety and thus, in my mind, best suited to the reality that man is fallen but, at the same time, capable of and indeed inwardly drawn towards more than the excessive transgressions of his own nature.