Cato's Letters
Trenchard, John & Gordon, Thomas
N owadays the only Cato most Americans have heard of is Kato Kadin, yet this statement poses a fascinating question: How did Kato hear of Cato? He must have, else he could not have chosen it for his...
...known as Cato the Younger...
...so let them take heart, the pain is nothing, and will be soon over...
...No more than Cato without liberty...
...As a first step toward reforming Rome, Galba made a public vow not to bribe anyone, but the moment he said, "I will choose my soldiers, not buy them," the army assassinated him...
...Non magis quam Cato sine libertate—"What liberty without Cato...
...The government that ceases to believe this "is not government but usurpation...
...I did likewise bespeak, at least, a dozen curious axes, spick and span new, with rare steel edges...
...The Roman Republic was their touchstone, the ideal against which they judged all governance...
...For a convention keynote speech guaranteed to spark fears of an auto da fe, widen the gender gap, and offend animal-rights groups—all at the same time—Buchanan can use Cato's explanation of why a good cause need not fear a bad press: "A church is not the less sacred because curs frequently lift up their leg against it, and affront the wall: It is the nature of dogs...
...turned to treatises on radical Whig politics...
...He must have, else he could not have chosen it for his stage name...
...Perot's italics] A resolute Protestant, Cato was obsessed with the danger posed by the Jacobites, the Catholic supporters of James 11, who wanted to put the Stuarts back on the throne...
...Rescue is at hand for Lamar Alexander...
...In "The Necessary Decay of Popish States Shewn from the Nature of the Popish Religion," he lists every charge ever leveled against the Catholic Church: ostentatious wealth, licentious priests, riotous feast days, etc.—plus a new one...
...He probably got it from a boxer, human or canine, but where did they get it...
...Joseph Addison's play Cato (1713) was read aloud around the campfires of Valley Forge, and one of its lines—"What pity is it that we can die but once to save our country"—was recycled by Nathan Hale...
...These will do for the stump...
...Their knowledge of its history and language is staggering...
...t is tempting to speculate what would happen if these volumes fell into the hands of our current crop of tribunes...
...More succinct than Jefferson, Cato sums up Locke's theory of natural rights with Roman brevity: Salus populi suprema lex esto—"The benefit and safety to the people constitute the supreme law...
...Nor did he afterwards continue obstinately at the head of affairs...
...the fittest that could be made, for dividing nobly betwixt the head and the shoulders of any dignified and illustrious customer of mine...
...CATO'S LETTERS: OR, ESSAYS ON LIBERTY, CIVIL AND RELIGIOUS, AND OTHER IMPORTANT SUBJECTS John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon Edited and annotated by Ronald Hamowy Liberty Classics / 2 volumes /$30 cloth...
...The office he executed honestly and successfully, without the grimace and gains of a statesman...
...Tyranny is not government but a dissolution of it...
...Jesse Jackson's fatal attraction to seesawing parallelisms will get a big boost from Valerius: Quid ergo libertas sine Catone...
...Being bred a butcher, I can comfort my said customers with an assurance, that I have a delicate and ready hand at cutting and tying...
...Cato's Cromwellian puritanism and his hatred of the licentious Stuarts, the liberal elite of that day, need only a little editing to make the perfect anti-Hollywood speech for Phil Gramm: They will promote luxury, idleness, and expence, and a general depravation of manners [my Momma told me...
...Colonial America also knew another Cato, the pen name of two polemicists, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, who met in a London coffeehouse in 1720 and collaborated on a weekly letter to the London Journal that ran for three years...
...the text is liberally sprinkled with Latin quotations, translated in footnotes here but not in the originals...
...At first they concentrated their fire on the South Sea Bubble scandal, but quickly...
...The letters are bracingly masculine, free of the equivocations of today's tepid op-eds...
...Florence King's latest book is The Florence King Reader (St...
...His story inspired the Continental army...
...All he has to do is announce that absolutism destroys eloquence, and then say, "La Bruyere complains that the French are cramped in satire...
...neither does he "tend...
...There are plenty of zingers for Pat Buchanan: "The state of tyranny is a state of war...
...Wrote Tacitus: Nocuit antiquus rigor, et nimia severitas, cui jam pares non sumus—"He was resented for his old-fashioned harshness and excessive severity, qualities to which we are no longer equal...
...15 paper reviewed by FLORENCE KING 76 The American Spectator November 1995 Ross Perot will pounce on Cato's praise of Cincinnatus, early Rome's ultimate outside-the-Beltway politician, who looked under the hood not once but twice, fixed the trouble, and skedaddled back to his farm to beat his swords into plowshares...
...Students of our big lovable lug of a president will empathize with Cato's aversion to the feckless Stuarts, especially his take on James I, who was "such a wild mixture of timidity and pride, and familiarity, that many hated him, more despised him, and yet none feared him...
...When the new, improved Bob Dole is ready to satisfy the legions of people who are waiting for him to crack, he can turn to "Letter from John Ketch," in which Cato imagines England's legendary executioner harboring thoughts of dispatching the perpetrators of the South Sea Bubble...
...His tongue was never still...
...Personal virtue is fatal in a corrupt state," as the Emperor Galba discovered when he succeeded Nero...
...CI The American Spectator November 1995 77...
...Foreign princes derided him...
...She writes "The Misanthrope's Corner" column for National Review...
...In their treaties with one another they either took no notice of this keeper of the balance of Europe, or always outwitted him...
...He delighted in sifting metaphysical questions and in discussing dark points in divinity...
...The febrile primness of American "values" is alien to him...
...The candidate willing to use it would be credited with the freshest, most original gaffe in American political history: The Catholic practice of giving sanctuary, says Cato, makes bandits part of the establishment...
...In order to do this, they will bring into fashion gaming, drunkenness, gluttony, and profuse and costly dress...
...And so, for the ease of my mind, I beg that I may have those sent me, whom I may truss up with a safe conscience...
...As he came to it with universal consent, he resigned it with universal applause...
...That this was considered standard journalistic fare in the 18th century speaks volumes in defense of Western classical education...
...Martin's...
...My teeth particularly water, and my bowels yearn, at the name of the brokers...
...Government was not in those days [519 B.C.] a trade...
...He speaks of "virtues," whose root (vir means "male") imposes stark certainty on the maxim of Juvenal: Nobilitas solo est atque unica virtus—virtue is the one and only nobility...
...A staunch defender of republican principles, he was so opposed to Julius Caesar that, when the latter triumphed, Cato committed suicide...
...These are bizarre links in an unbroken chain stretching back to the Colonial era...
...Cato "feels" not, he thinks...
...It is wickedness not to destroy a destroyer...
...for God's sake, let me have the brokers...
...and will contrive and encourage publick revels, nightly disguises, and debauched mummeries [just like my Momma always said...
...They will debauch their country with foreign vices, and foreign instruments of vicious pleasures...
...He also has a message for the freshman class of the 1994 Congress...
...The name has lived on in all sorts of unlikely ways, because once every American knew who Cato was...
...He was Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis (95-46 B.C...
...Their letters, later published in book form, were wildly popular in the American colonies and became a major inspiration in the struggle for independence...
...This is guaranteed to deflect attention from that plaid shirt...
Vol. 28 • November 1995 • No. 11
