Samuel Iperusz Wiselius Quotes
It is important not to confuse the national spirit with that of the faction which presently dominates…
Samuel Iperusz Wiselius, 1769–1845, Dutch Attorney, Patriot & Historian, Superintendent of Police, Statement to General Auguste Marmont, Quoted in Simon Schama, Patriots & Liberators: Revolution in the Netherlands 1780-1813
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His use of the noun “Democracy” refers not to a form of government but the specific institution of the Democratic Party. Smith, like many of the Founding Fathers was deeply suspicious of political parties. See also {614907}. Smith had written to most of the then likely Presidential candidates of both major parties asking for their position on the Mormons who were facing persecution wherever they went. None of the politicians would make any satisfactory commitments. Smith took Direct Action and became the only major religious official to have run for the Presidency of the United States until Pat Robertson tried and failed in 2000. Smith’s assassination shortly thereafter cut his run for the Presidency short before it made much headway and politically he had no chance to affect the race.
This was a new political phenomenon where a President was perceived as more important, more powerful, and preferable to his party. Note that the base of the scale is labeled “Public Opinion”.
The Tea Party Republican faction was opposed to government doing much of anything other than Defense and Foreign Policy. The regular Republicans saw a much more extensive and robust role of government though few did so to the same extent as Abraham Lincoln and the other founders of the Republican Party, and Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower the Republicans following in the Alexander Hamilton tradition.
After defeating the Federalists, Jefferson tried to unite a politically divided and fractious country:
Theodore Roosevelt was the Presidential nominee
Opposition to the Bolsheviks
Faction was the then common word for political party. James Madison frequently used the word in this sense. See {606044}.
Madison wrote this essay for publication in New York. That state, one of the largest and most important of the 13 colonies, was polarized about the proposed Constitution and Madison, Hamilton and John Jay produced this great set of essays to convince Americans to vote for ratification. Madison acknowledged that many people had complained about various aspects of the proposed constitution and in this essay he deals with the complaints about political parties—“factions”.
What is particularly interesting about this quotation is that at the time, this was a common concern by political and social thinkers of the West. Here however, we learn that there was apparently the same concern and problem ongoing in the Muslim Middle East.
Samuel Iperuszoon, Knight Wiselius was a successful Dutch lawyer and a prominent Patriot and democrat, involved in the dismantling of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and the negotiations over the Cape. Wiselius was a witty, Voltairian spirit with political views far ahead of his time who would end his days writing dramas on Classical themes. Wiselius corresponded with nearly all the main players at the time of the Batavian Republic and it would be impossible to know that period completely without his carefully kept and neatly written correspondence. He was also a poet, historian and superintendent of the police.
