http://www.indiana.edu/~h105swrd/readin ... g1799.html
"To all the Republicans, Farmers, Mechanics, and Laborers in America in America. Your candid attention is requested to the sentiments of a Laborer.
Learning and knowledge is essential to the preservation of liberty; and unless we have more of it among us, we cannot support our liberties long...
Men are born and grow up in this world with a vast variety of capacities, strengths, and abilities both of body and mind, and have strongly implanted in them numerous passions and lusts continually urging them to acts of fraud, violence, and injustice towards each other. Although they have implanted in them a sense of right and wrong (so that if they would always follow the dictates of their consciences and do as they would be done by, they would need no other law or government), yet as they are sentenced by the just decrees of heaven to hard labor for a living in this world, and have so strongly implanted in them a desire of self-support, self-defense, self-love, self-conceit, and self-aggrandizement that it engrosses all their care and attention -- so that they can see nothing beyond self. For self (as once described by a divine) is like an object placed before the eye that hinders the sight of every thing beyond.
This selfishness may be discerned in every person, let their conditions in life be what they will; and it operates so powerfully as to disqualify them from judging right in their own cause. There is no station in this life that a man can be raised to that clears him from this selfishness. On the contrary, it is a solemn truth that the higher a person is raised in stations of honor, power, and trust[,] the greater are his temptations to do wrong and gratify those selfish principles. Give a man honor and he wants more. Give a man power and he wants more. Give him money and he wants more. In short, he is never easy: but the more he has[,] the more he wants....
From these natural dispositions of mankind arise not only the advantages but the absolute necessity of civil government. Without it, mankind would be continually at war on their own species, stealing and robbing, fighting with, and killing one another. This all nations on earth have been convinced of and have established it in some form or other; and their sole aim in doing it is their safety and happiness. But for want of wisdom or some plan to curb the ambition and govern those to whom they gave power, they have often been brought to suffer as much under their government as they would without any; and it still remains uncertain whether such a plan can be found or not....
The most comprehensive description of Man I ever saw was by a writer as followeth--Viz--Man is a being made up of self love seeking his own happiness to the misery of all around him, who would damn a world to save himself from temporal or other punishments and he who denies this to be his real character is ignorant of himself, or is more than a man."
William Manning
1799
