Washington's Farewell Address: 1796

Excerpts from Chapter 2: New American Revolution

“Appeasement if feeding the dragon hoping he will eat you last.”  Winston Churchill

“Do not separate the text from the historical background.  If you do, you will have perverted the Constitution, which can only end in a distorted, bastardized form of illegitimate government.”    James Madison

                                            FAREWELL ADDRESS
                                       President George Washington
                                              September 19th 1796

    To the people of the United States,

….. But the Constitution which at any time exists, ‘til changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole people, is sacredly obligatory upon all.  The very idea of the power and the right of the people to establish government, presupposes the duty of every individual to obey the established government.
      All obstructions to the execution of the laws, all combinations and associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, (i.e. public forum) are destructive of this fundamental principle, and of fatal tendency.  They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of the party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels, and modified by mutual interests.
     However combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.
    …. Let there be no change (in Constitutional powers) by usurpation (i.e. no pubic forum); for through this, in one instance, may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed.

   What Washington warns us of in his Farewell Address is the privatization by the First United States Bank, of Congress’s constitutional duty to coin and regulate the currency of the nation.   This is a fact because it is the only constitutional duty of the federal government that had been farmed out to a private corporation at the time Washington gave this address.
    If Washington were here today, he would say we have given everything back he had won.
    Washington is literally talking about the 1700’s equivalent of our Federal Reserve Bank.