'Trenchard and Gordon died well before the Declaration of Independence in 1776, which their work helped to propel. The Founders and Framers heeded their lessons on public corruption, the importance of accountability in the state, and the importance of freedom itself..
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Cato defines public spirit as love of one’s country—we’d say “patriotism”—and the term recurs throughout the 138 letters. He writes:"This is publick spirit; which contains in it every laudable passion…it is the highest virtue, and contains in it almost all others; steadfastness to good purposes, fidelity to one’s trust, resolution in difficulties, defiance of danger, contempt of death, and impartial benevolence to all mankind. It is a passion to promote universal good, with personal pain, loss, and peril: It is one man’s care for many, and the concern of every man for all."
Cato himself admits that the notion may be antiquated, “too heroic, at least for the living generation” of the eighteenth century, but public spirit summarizes the qualities required to be part of a res publica, a republic. Republics have citizens, not subjects, and besides their obligation to self-preservation, citizens have duties to each other and the common good.''In Revolutionary America, colonists read Cato’s Letters for its rousing lessons on liberty, power, tyranny, and republican government.
If you were to attend an average American history course today, you’d be lucky to pick up on any principles behind the American Revolution beyond unjust taxation and perhaps opposition to monarchy. If you were unlucky, you might hear fantastical reasons like white supremacy and slavery, as posited in the radical revisionist “1619 Project.”
One thing you would struggle to find is any mention of the most popular political work of the late-colonial period that educated colonists knew and could often quote:
Cato’s Letters.2023 marks the 300th anniversary of the publication of the collection of 138 pseudonymous letters in English newspapers. They were penned in response to public outrage over the South Sea Bubble and were influential in British politics and in the colonies.
Authors John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon chose the Roman statesman and Stoic Cato the Younger (95–46 BC) as a pseudonym because of his strong opposition to corruption in the Roman Republic. In his final days during the Civil War, he committed suicide rather than surrender to Julius Caesar, whose tyrannical claims Cato opposed.
The South Sea bubble was an early instance of government-corporate cronyism. In 1711, the South Sea Company was formed as a speculative venture to exchange England’s nine-million-pound national debt for shares in the company. The company’s purported value was based on a monopoly granted by Parliament to trade in the Spanish colonies of the New World and a license to provide African slaves to those colonies.
The company never turned a profit, nor could it even make interest payments, but company leaders, speculators, and even British royals drove the price of the stock in 1720 from £125 to £950 in just six months through intense speculation. When the bubble burst, share prices fell to £185, many lost huge sums, and the debt had to be exchanged once again into the national bank and other public financial institutions.
Trenchard and Gordon recognized the South Sea Bubble not merely as a financial crisis, but a crisis of political corruption and lack of public spirit: government leaders had colluded with financial manipulators on a huge racket and betrayed the public trust. If that sounds familiar, you’ll understand why I want my fellow citizens to revisit the letters with me. The acts of government-corporate collusion and mischief take different forms today, but the underlying problems are largely the same. Below, I share some key lessons for our current age.
Note: unless otherwise noted, “Cato” refers to Trenchard and Gordon, the authors of the 18th-century letters, not the ancient Cato Younger..
..power must be checked, and rulers must be accountable to citizens, be they kings, presidents, or consuls. In the United States, we have no king, but who are the leaders who evade accountability while wielding power? Congress? The President?
Neither. Our most unaccountable leaders are those in the regulatory and administrative state, the vast apparatus of bureaus and agencies created democratically by Congress but which have turned into powerful political institutions in their own right. These are the institutions that make citizens small and corrupt interests large. Cato could not have foreseen the modern regulatory state, but he still provides guidance on how to wrangle it.
In Letter 8, he presents the case of monopolies under Queen Elizabeth I. When she learned that some of her advisors had tricked her into granting them monopolies on certain commodities for their own profit, she publicly apologized and acknowledged her wrong judgment—and then delivered the guilty within her court up to justice. The queen’s solution to corruption was also Cato’s: severity in the defense of liberty.
Cato explains that the peace and security of a society are maintained through the twin forces of “the terror of laws, and the ties of mutual interest.” We know these tools proverbially as the carrot and the stick, and Cato stresses that the impulse toward self-preservation, or self-love, drives people to pursue the carrot and avoid the stick. But strong leaders must be willing to escalate and use constitutional power—the stick.
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The law for Cato had the two-fold purpose of encouraging virtue and discouraging vice. Good government and happy people are found where “the laws are honestly intended, and equally executed.” Healthy societies cannot have double standards for public officials and corporations. In such a society, honest citizens and dishonest officials would be treated in the same manner.
Cato was especially concerned about the abuses of power perpetrated by public officials because of their power of influence over society. And he was adamant that the crimes of private citizens were not comparable to those of public officials because “the first terminate in the death or sufferings of single persons; the other ruin millions, subvert the policy and economy of nations, and create general want, and its consequences, discontents, insurrections, and civil wars, at home; and often make them a prey to watchful enemies abroad.”
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While Cato praised virtuous self-interest, he also identified the obsessive desire for luxury as a danger to society. This was hardly a new idea in Western canon, but these ideas are constantly being forgotten. That was certainly the case in the lead-up to the South Sea Bubble.
Millennia before, Rome’s stable society and republican government atrophied as its leading citizens sought opulence. Wealth itself was not the problem, but rather a culture of narcissism that drove people to seek wealth in order to lavish it on their personal whims, rather than put it to productive use.
..It bears remembering that “republic” comes from the Latin
res publica, meaning “the common matter,” and republics depend on a public spiritedness to unite citizens in a zeal for liberty and the republic itself.
As the leading Roman citizens and politicians pursued their private whims, they set the tone for citizens of every rank to do the same. A mimetic cycle ensued by which everyone sought to live more grandly than the next. Both the great and the humble turned in on their own interests and abandoned interest in the republic they shared responsibility for in common.
In some instances, Roman statesmen literally prioritized their own fishponds as the republic fell apart. Read more about that in “Fishponds and Fighters.”
On Public Spirit"'Twas in vain to think of bribing a man, who supped upon the coleworts of his own garden. He could not be gained by gold, who did not think it necessary. He that could rise from the plough to the triumphal chariot, and contentedly return thither again, could not be corrupted."The civilizations that Cato valorizes—Rome and Sparta among them—were societies in which virtue, honor, and public spirit were prized far above wealth. In these societies, men could be honorable and poor. Cato uses the example of coleworts to describe the ultimate simple but admirable lifestyle in antiquity. Today, we call this leafy vegetable “kale.”
When men’s honor came as a reward for their virtue, virtue became popular and sought after in society. Rulers ought to be interested in making their people virtuous, as the virtuous are governable, good citizens, but wicked rulers strategically introduce vice in order to debauch their subjects so that they will quietly bear the yoke of tyranny.
Cato defines public spirit as love of one’s country—we’d say “patriotism”—and the term recurs throughout the 138 letters. He writes:
"This is publick spirit; which contains in it every laudable passion…it is the highest virtue, and contains in it almost all others; steadfastness to good purposes, fidelity to one’s trust, resolution in difficulties, defiance of danger, contempt of death, and impartial benevolence to all mankind. It is a passion to promote universal good, with personal pain, loss, and peril: It is one man’s care for many, and the concern of every man for all."Cato himself admits that the notion may be antiquated, “too heroic, at least for the living generation” of the eighteenth century, but public spirit summarizes the qualities required to be part of a
res publica, a republic. Republics have citizens, not subjects, and besides their obligation to self-preservation, citizens have duties to each other and the common good.
Without that spirit, tyrants inevitably fill the void.
Trenchard and Gordon died well before the Declaration of Independence in 1776, which their work helped to propel. The Founders and Framers heeded their lessons on public corruption, the importance of accountability in the state, and the importance of freedom itself. In James Madison’s first draft of the 1st Amendment, he paraphrased Letter 15.
Cato:
Freedom of speech is the great bulwark of liberty; they prosper and die together: And it is the terror of traitors and oppressors, and a barrier against them.Madison:
The people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, to write, or to publish their sentiments; and the freedom of the press, as one of the great bulwarks of liberty, shall be inviolable.We Americans should be wary of anyone who would attack the pillars of our republic—the honest pursuit of wealth, the spirit of patriotism, and the rule of law, including the “great bulwarks of liberty.” These are worth fighting for.
The Liberty Fund has published a two-volume edition of Cato’s Letters and made the text freely available online. I would encourage anyone to read them for many more lessons.'
- John Mauldin,
The Survival of the Republic, November 25, 2023
Context(The fall of the Republic) - 'The United States today is, once again, headed for civil war..'(US headed for the Second Civil War, a failed state) - '..Trump’s recent comments [like] .. fascist dictators of the 1930s.'(Spanish, English, Chinese) - The Values: 'You only have to read one book, "The History of Spain" by Father Juan de Mariana.' - Thomas Jefferson(Banking Reform - English/Dutch) '..a truly stable financial and monetary system for the twenty-first century..'