Republic
(Free from things public)
Vs.
Democracy
(A mob for a king)
“The multitude of those who err is no protection for error.”
“But the chief priests and elders persuaded the multitude that they should ask Barabbas, and destroy Jesus. The governor answered and said unto them, Whether of the twain will ye that I release unto you? They said, Barabbas. Pilate saith unto them, What shall I do then with Jesus which is called Christ? [They] all say unto him, Let him be crucified. And the governor said, Why, what evil hath he done? But they cried out the more, saying, Let him be crucified. When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but [that] rather a tumult was made, he took water, and washed [his] hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye [to it]. Then answered all the people, and said, His blood [be] on us, and on our children.” (Mt 27:20, 25)
“Throughout history, rulers and court intellectuals have aspired to use the educational system to shape their nations, The model was set out by Plato in The Republic and was constructed most faithfully in Soviet Russia, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany.... One can see how irresistible a vehicle the schools would be to any social engineer. They represent a unique opportunity to mold future citizens early in life, to instill in them the proper reverence for the ruling culture, and to prepare them to be obedient and obeisant taxpayers and soldiers.”
“Our forefathers, inhabitants of the island of Great Britain, left their native land, to seek on these shores a residence for civil and religious freedom.”
Civil and religious freedom had become difficult to find in Great Britain. The people were willing to brave tremendous hardships, even death by the thousands, in order to find that freedom. Did those people feel that there was civil and religious freedom to be found here in the Americas?
At first, it was nearly impossible to find settlers to colonize this new land until the signing of the colonial charters by Charles I, and eventually Charles II, which waived rights of the kings of England that had inhabited Great Britain. Since William of Normandy took Harold’s lands, chattels, and personal property in action by right of “judgment in arms” in 1066 with his success at Hastings, the civil freedoms of freemen has been constantly under attack. Except for the threat of the sword by the nobles at Runnymede and the occasional revolt, there was no real progress back toward the natural liberty enjoyed by the freeman before the “will and order” of William and his “Doomsday Book” establishing his legal systems.
“The laws of England are threefold: common law, customs, and decrees of parliament.”
“Before the Norman conquest of England in 1066, the people were the fountainhead of justice. The Angloe-Saxon courts were composed of large numbers of freemen and the law which they administered, was that which had been handed down by oral tradition from generation to generation. In competition with these popular, nonprofessional courts the Norman king, who insisted that he was the fountainhead of justice, set up his own tribunals… The angloe-Saxon tribunals had been open to all; every freeman could appeal to them for justice.”
This conflict between the Common Law and the Civil Law was one of the most important factors motivating the original immigration to the Americas for those seeking civil and religious freedom. After all, it was the oppressive civil laws handed down by the tyrannical kings and weak parliaments that was imposing the religious persecution on the people. But it was the religious reformists, trying to right the unrighteous practices of that system, that had stimulated the governments religious and civil oppression.
“When the common law and statue law concur, the common law is to be preferred.”
With the common law, the people were the fountainhead of justice through their system of trial by jury. “The jury has a right to judge both the law as well as the fact in controversy.” “The pages of history shine on instances of the jury’s exercise of its prerogative to disregard instructions of the judge; for example, acquittals under the fugitive slave law.” “The common law right of the jury to determine the law as well as the facts remains unimpaired.”
When a Common Law jury sits, “The law itself is on trial quite as much as the cause which is to be decided.” In most courts today, the jury is a jury of persons who have sworn to decide the facts of a case in accordance with presumptions of law established by the legislature and interpreted by the judge.
“Man (homo) is a term of nature; person (persona), of the civil law.”
“In no relation can the religious motive in English expansion be neglected without doing violence to the record… Still more significant in English expansion than the work of preachers in quest of souls to save were the labors of laymen from the religious sects of every variety who fled to the wilderness in search of a haven all their own.”
“…Faith in Christ inspired the missionaries… and.. colonists who subdued the waste places of the new world…”
“Now the commercial corporation for colonization,… was in reality a kind of autonomous state. Like the state, it had a constitution, a superior law binding constituent and officers.”
“The colonies were ‘companies.’ ‘The legal instrument for realization of that design was a charter granted by ‘the dominionitive authority of the king’ uniting the sponsors of the enterprise in ‘one body politic and corporate,’ known as the Trustees for establishing the colony…”
“Thus every essential element long afterward found in the government of the American state appeared in the chartered corporation that started English civilization in America.”
Until the colonial charters were signed, consequently ridding the kingdom of troublesome rebels, there seemed to be no relief from the encroachment of government authority. In those charters, the individual colonies were called “a republic.” But what kind of republics were they? They were not utopias, but refuges of individual responsibility where no law could be made “except by the consent of the freeman.”
“The civil law reduces the unwilling freedman to his original slavery;
but the laws of the Angloes judge once manumitted as ever after free.”
Today, the government is referenced as the United States Federal Democracy, even though, at the beginnings of government in the Americas, the word “republic” was the title most sought and most used. Is there a difference?
“The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government…”
“Republic. A commonwealth; that form of government in which the administration of affairs is open to all the citizens. In another sense, it signifies the state, independently of its government.”
We see here that there may be more than one sense to the word “republic”. First, the ‘administration of affairs’ is open to citizens and it can be referred to as a commonwealth, which denotes the general welfare of the people or the public. In the other sense, a republic ‘signifies the state independent of its government’.
What does that mean? Haven’t we been taught that the state is the government? Here it says that the state is independent from the government. The word “state” in Webster’s has almost twenty different definitions. A state is a status or an estate or a condition of life which, in the case of a republic, can be independent of its government.
In another place, we find the word “republic” defined, “A state or nation in which the supreme power rests in all the citizens… A state or nation with a president as its titular head; distinguished from monarchy.” In this definition, we see again that the supreme power is in the hands of the citizen, who is entitled to vote. The representatives are in charge of administrating the affairs of government. In the second definition, it states that the singular executive is titular. Titular is defined as, “existing in title or name only; nominal…” while a monarch is “a single or sole ruler of a state… a person or a thing that suppresses others of the same kind.”
The United States Federal Government is to guarantee to every State, status or condition of life a Republican form of government. Why then does the government of the states and the United States seem to have such a supreme authority over almost every aspect of its citizenry and their lives? What is the true nature of this American Republic?
“The term republic, res publica, signifies the state independently of its form of government.”
Before we go further, it should be understood that the original republic was one in which a freeman was free from civil authority and religiously allowed to accept or reject his God as King. The word “republic” was used because those early pilgrims and separatists knew its origins. It is a shortened form of the Latin idiom “Libera res Publica”, meaning “free from things public.” The heads of the government were “titular” in authority, meaning that they held authority “in name only.” In an indirect democracy, the mob elects those that govern the whole, while, in the republic, you only elected representatives with a limited authority.
Even before the so-called American Revolution, the united States found that, “Natural law was the first defense of colonial liberty.” Also, “There was a secondary line upon which much skirmishing took place and which some Americans regarded as the main field of battle. The colonial charters seemed to offer an impregnable defense against abuses of parliamentary power because they were supposed to be compacts between the king and people of the colonies; which, while confirming royal authority in America, denied by implication the right of Parliament to intervene in colonial affairs. Charters were grants of the king and made no mention of the parliament. They were even thought to hold good against the King, for it was believed that the King derived all the power he enjoyed in the colonies from the compacts he had made with the settlers. Some colonists went so far to claim that they were granted by the ‘King of Kings’-and therefore ‘no earthly Potentate can take them away.’”
John Adams said that when the grantees of the:
“Massachusetts Bay Charter carried it to America they ‘got out of the English realm, dominions, state, empire, call it by what name you will, and out of the legal jurisdiction of the Parliament. The king might, by his writ or proclamation, have commanded him to return; but he did not. By this interpretation, the charters accorded Americans’ all the rights and privileges of a natural free-born subject of Great Britain and gave colonial assemblies the sole right of imposing taxes.”
“Accordingly, when Americans were told that they had no constitutional basis for their claim of execution from parliamentary authority, they answered, ‘Our Charters have done it absolutely.’ ‘And if one protests,’ remarked a Tory, ‘the answer is, You are an Enemy to America, and ought to have your brains beat out.’”
George Washington, in his General Order of July 9, 1776, speaks of rights and liberties already possessed and to be defended as Christians, when he said, “The General hopes and trusts that every officer and man will endeavor so to live, and act, as becomes a Christian Soldier defending the dearest Rights and Liberties of his country.”
Almost from the beginning of English settlement, the government permitted the tradition of local liberty to take such firm root in America so that Alexander Hamilton could say in 1775 that “the rights we now claim are coeval with the original settlement of these colonies.”
Samuel Adams stated, on August 1, 1776, within one month of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, “Our Union is complete; our constitution composed, established, and approved. You are now the guardians of your own liberties. We may justly address you, as the decemviri did the Romans, and say: ‘Nothing that we propose can pass into law without your consent. Be yourself, O Americans, the authors of those laws on which your happiness depends.’”
The early Americans let the facts be submitted to a candid world in their Declaration of Independence as they stood against the King of Great Britain. Their complaint was not due to taxation without representation as is popularly taught in public schools. They did speak of an absolute despotism, and that it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new guards for their future security. That new guard became the state militia, but now has been replaced by a federal army and soon by a U.N. police force. What was the history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having the indirect object the establishment of an absolute tyranny? The list is long and numerous and sounds like a description of life in these United States, but it does include taxes imposed without consent.
“For imposing taxes on us without our Consent:”
“The term ‘sovereign power’ of a state is often used without any very definite idea of its meaning, and it is often misapplied… The sovereignty of a state does not reside in the persons who fill the different departments of its government, but in the People, from whom the government emanated; and they may change it at their discretion. Sovereignty, then, in this country, abides with the constituency, and not with the agent; and this remark is true, both in reference to the federal and state government.”
“This word ‘person’ and its scope and bearing in the law, involving, as it does, legal fictions and also apparently natural beings, it is difficult to understand; but it is absolutely necessary to grasp, at whatever cost, a true and proper understanding of the word in all the phases of its proper use… The words persona and personae did not have the meaning in the Roman which attaches to homo, the individual, or a man in the English; it had peculiar references to artificial beings, and the condition or status of individuals… A person is here not a physical or individual person, but the status or condition with which he is invested… not an individual or physical person, but the status, condition or character borne by physical persons… The law of persons is the law of status or condition.”
“A moment's reflection enables one to see that man and person cannot be synonymous, for there cannot be an artificial man, though there are artificial persons. Thus the conclusion is easily reached that the law itself often creates an entity or a being which is called a person; the law cannot create an artificial man, but it can and frequently does invest him with artificial attributes; this is his personality… that is to say, the man-person; and abstract persons, which are fiction and which have no existence except in law; that is to say, those which are purely legal conceptions or creations.”
“We are not contending that our rabble, or all unqualified persons, shall have the right of voting, or not be taxed; but that the freeholders and electors, whose right accrues to them from the common law, or from charter, shall not be deprived of that right.”
“The United States government is a foreign corporation with respect to a state.”
The fact that the State governments, as Republics of America before and after the ratification of The Constitution of the United States, rested, not in the hands of the State governments, but in the hands and hearts of the individual freeman living on his land in fee-simple. The state governments had no real sovereign authority to make the United States a sovereign nation with dominion over the people. The states, knowing they had only a titular authority, ratified the Constitution, creating the United States in the name of the people and vested in that corporate being those few and limited rights and responsibilities that they had assumed from the delinquent king of England.
Again, as Judge Learned Hand stated, “I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes to much upon constitutions, upon laws and courts. These are false hopes, believe me; these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no Constitution, no law, no court can save it.”
“Just as the revolutionary Adams opposed the Constitution in Massachusetts, so did Patrick Henry in Virginia, and the contest in that most important State of all was prolonged and bitter. He who in stamp Act days had proclaimed that there should be no Virginians or New Yorkers, but only Americans, now declaimed as violently against the preamble of the Constitution because it began, ‘We the people of the United States’ instead of ‘We, the State.’ Like many, he feared a ‘consolidated’ government, and the loss of states rights. Not only Henry but much abler men, such as Mason, Benjamin Harrison, Munroe, R.H. Lee were also opposed and debated… others in what was the most acute discussion carried on anywhere…”
“Owing to the way in which the conventions were held, the great opposition manifested everywhere, and the management required to secure the barest majorities for ratification, it seems impossible to avoid the conclusion that the greater part of the people were opposed to the Constitution.”
“It was not submitted to the people directly, and in those days of generally limited suffrage, even those who voted for delegates to the State conventions were mostly of a propertied class, although the amount of property called for may have been slight.”
“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights,
shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”
Even Alexander Hamilton wrote against the Bill of Rights, “Here, in strictness, the people surrender nothing; and as they retain everything they have no need of particular reservations....”
“But a minute detail of particular rights is certainly far less applicable to a constitution like that under consideration, which is merely intended to regulate the general political interests of a nation, than a constitution which has regulation of every species of personal and private concerns.”
He went on to say that the bill of rights were “unnecessary” and even “dangerous.” “They would contain various exceptions to powers not granted; and, on this very account, would afford a colorable pretext to claim more than were granted. For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do?”
“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
“A constitution is a body of precepts, the purpose of which is to control government action until modified in some authorized manner. These precepts may be either written or unwritten.”
It was not the Constitution of the United States, but the body of precepts, that predated it, including the charters, that was the original guardian of the American free dominion.
“Lawyers are being graduated from law school by the thousands who have little knowledge of the constitution. When organizations seek a lawyer to instruct them on the Constitution they find it nearly impossible to secure one competent.”
The once colonial and now state administrative government and other equitable and economic interests wanted a Constitution. The State, status of the sovereign people, was independent of the administrating government in the republics. This explains the need to use the phrase, “We the People of the United States.” This new agreement had almost no power over, “The ordinary citizen, living on his farm, owned in fee simple, untroubled by any relics of feudalism, untaxed save by himself, saying his say to all the world in town meetings.” For he, “had a new self-reliance. Wrestling with his soul and plough on week days, and the innumerable points of the minister’s sermon on Sundays and meeting days, he was coming to be a tough nut for any imperial system to crack” and he certainly didn’t want this new Constitution.
“And Saul said unto Samuel, I have sinned: for I have transgressed the commandment of the LORD, and thy words: because I feared the people, and obeyed their voice.” (1Sa 15:24)
This corporate charter, called the Constitution, was signed by the members of the convention and later ratified by the weak State governments, “in Order to form a more perfect Union,… and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
“You have a republic, now can you keep it.”
“Government is instituted to protect property of every sort; as well as that which lies in the various rights of individuals, as that which the term particularly expresses. This being the end of government, this alone is a just government, which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own… That is not a just government, nor is property secure under it, where the property a man has in his personal safety and personal liberty, is violated by arbitrary seizures of one class of citizens for the service of the rest.”
“The first requisite of a citizen in this Republic of ours, is that
he shall be able and willing to pull his own weight.”
Everyday in the United States, one class of citizens procures for itself the property of another through taxation and lobbied legislated statutes. Schools, old age benefits, health care, aid, all types of assistance, insurance, benefits, and grants, even foreign nations reap the benefits of friendship and camaraderie with the United States Federal Government at the expense of the taxpayers.
“But Jesus called them [unto him], and said, Ye know that the princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion over them, and they that are great exercise authority upon them. But it shall not be so among you: but whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister; And whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant: Even as the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.” (Matthew 20:25, 28)
If this is true, then a democracy cannot be Christian in nature, because, in a democracy, 51% of the people ‘exercise authority’ over the other 49%. Then again, if the majority of the people in the United States were Christian in nature, they would at least manifest a democracy that had a Christian appearance, but alas, this does not seem to be the case either.
In a republic, the people should pull their own weight, they surrender nothing, no law can be made except by their individual consent, the status of the people is independent from government, and that government is titular in its authority, meaning in name only”.
“The Superior man thinks always of virtue; the common man thinks of comfort.”
Are we confusing forms of government? Is there a distinction we are not making? Has something been changed or done that we have missed?
What is, “Most relevant to republicanism in the Western world?” Is it, “Aristotle’s distinction between democracy, the perverted form of rule by the many, and its opposite polity, the good form. He believed that democracies were bound to experience turbulence and instability because the poor, who he assumed would be the majority in democracies, would seek an economic and social equality that would stifle individual initiative and enterprise. In contrast, polity, with a middle class capable of justly adjudicating conflicts between the rich and poor, would allow for rule by the many without the problems and chaos associated with democratic regimes.” Still, is this Christ’s kingdom’s plan?
“He becometh poor that dealeth [with] a slack hand: but the hand of the diligent maketh rich.” (Pr. 10:4)
The poor have sought economic and social equality. But have they been the majority? They have certainly been assisted by the political demagogues wearing specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people. The economic middle class has diminished in America, but more importantly, the ethical and moral middle class, who would never consider taking from his brother what he has not earned for himself, has all but disappeared.
“Accustomed to trampling on the rights of others, you have lost the genius of your own independence and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises among you.”
Madison clarified our status in this “a Republic with federal form.” “It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of society against the injustice of the other part. Different classes of citizens. If a majority be united by common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure. In a free government the security for civil rights must be the same as that for religious rights.”
But doesn’t the Constitution guarantee a ‘Republican Form of Government’?
It is only the States that are guaranteed a Republican form of government, and only if they want it and take the responsibility for it. Keep in mind that, in a republic, the State (status, estate… resting in the rights of the freeman) may be separate from its government. Today, we still have that republic, but many of its inhabitants are also members of a democracy, not by legislative decree, but by our own voluntary consent through participation in word and deed. You have to look back no further than April 3, 1918, when the new American creed was read in Congress, beginning with the words, “I believe in the United States of America as a government… whose just powers are derived from the consent of the governed: a democracy in a republic.” In other words, the United States Federal Democracy is an ever changing corporate society that was created by the State administrative governments and it has no authority and or jurisdiction over the status or estate of the freeman in America living in the original republic, which predated the U.S. Constitution. But who lives there?
“Constantly bearing in mind that entering into society individuals must give up a share of liberty”
The United States is a corporate government within the original Republic. It occupied land outside the states and had little jurisdiction within their boundaries. Even after they illegally ratified the Constitution of the United States, the States were still as foreign to each other as Mexico is to Canada.
With that unconstitutional ratification, the state governments literally were in revolt against the will of the free and common people of America. Over the following years, the corporate State grew in power, position, and authority by offering a banquet of benefits, gratuities, and grants. Few have taken the time to obtain the knowledge of what is contained in the political recipe of those stirring the caldron of government soup.
Remember, “Civil rights are such as belong to every citizen of the state or country, or, in a wider sense to all its inhabitants, and are not connected with the organization or the administration of government. They include the rights of property, marriage, protection by laws, freedom of contract, trial by jury, etc. Or, as otherwise defined, civil rights are rights appertaining to a person in virtue of his citizenship in a state or community. Rights capable of being enforced or redressed in civil action. Also a term applied to certain rights secured to citizens of the United States by the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution, and by various acts of Congress made in pursuance thereof.”
“The Fourteenth Amendment recognizes two types of citizenship, national and state”, which are clearly defined above when it is remembered that sovereignty in the state is vested in the individual man, not the persons of government. The states have steadily (as they have done from the beginning) betrayed the people for the expansion of their own corporate power. Power gives appetite for more power.
There are civil rights that belong to every citizen of a state or status. Or, as otherwise defined, there are civil rights pertaining to a person in virtue of his citizenship in a state or community. But what community?
In the early days of the republic, the United States knew that, “In one sense, the term ‘sovereign’ has for its correlative ‘subject.’ In this sense, the term can receive no application; for it has no object in the [Original] Constitution of the United States. Under that Constitution there are citizens, but no subjects.” But we have seen this change over time.
In the original Republics, citizenship of the individual freeman depended upon his ownership of land. Legal title does not include ownership. In the United States, its political obligation is dependent on the enjoyment of the protection of government; and it “binds the citizen”.
“And whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” (Matthew. 16:19)
It should also be understood that, “an individual can be a Citizen of one of the several States without being a citizen of the United States,” and an individual may become, “a citizen of the United States without being a Citizen of a State.” Although from that moment of attached citizenship in the United States, the individual would be an individual person. The States have also been bound by their agreements until they are no more than corporate entities of the United States.
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” “This section recognizes the difference between citizen of United States and Citizens of a state.”
“Both before and after the Fourteenth Amendment to the Federal Constitution, it has not been necessary for a person to be a citizen of the United States in order to be a citizen of his state.” But, “The term resident and citizen of the United States is distinguished from a Citizen of one of the several states, in that the former is a special class of citizen created by congress.”
It is stated over and over that there is a citizenship with civil rights that is not connected with the organization or the administration of government and there is another citizenship that is granted to a person in virtue of his citizenship with rights redressed in civil action and citizens of the United States by the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. The civil rights of a citizen of the United States is a completely regulated privilege because one type of, “’civil right’ is a right given and protected by law [through a legal system], and a person’s enjoyment therefore is regulated entirely by the law [the legal system] that creates it.”
The United States is subject to such “deceitful meats” and it has compromised its sovereignty among nations. But are the fifty States and the United States the only governments we have to choose from? Or is there a government that would not apply to the dainties of the nations or eat at its table of deceit?
“The budget should be balanced, the treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.”
The Kingdom of God is an alternative to the men who call themselves benefactors but exercise authority one over the other. To find that kingdom of righteousness men must repent... change their ways from that of the “world” to the ways of Christ and His appointed kingdom of heaven.
When you sit to eat with governments, consider what is put before you. If you be a man of appetite, put a knife to your throat. Don’t be desirous of their deceitful dainties and offerings. (see Proverbs 23:1, 3) Everything government offers, it has taken from others.
“Where, Say Some, is the king of America? I’ll tell you, Friend, he reigns above, and doth not make havoc of mankind…
“As long as the child breathes the poisoned air of nationalism, education in world-mindedness can produce only precarious results. As we have pointed out, it is frequently the family that infects the child with extreme nationalism. The school should therefore use the means described earlier to combat family attitudes that favor jingoism . . . . We shall presently recognize in nationalism the major obstacle to development of world-mindedness. We are at the beginning of a long process of breaking down the walls of national sovereignty. UNESCO must be the pioneer.”
Will all of America go under this new world nation or just those within the authority of the United States? Can you be under King Jesus and give obeisance to a one world order? Can you continue to take its mark and serve its gods? If you give allegiance to the United States and the United States goes under such authority, are you swept away in the harvest of those who would be god of this new world order?
“And the light of a candle shall shine no more at all in thee; and the voice of the bridegroom and of the bride shall be heard no more at all in thee: for thy merchants were the great men of the earth; for by thy sorceries were all nations deceived.” (Re 18:23)
Footnotes
|
