Page 166 - Beers With Our Founding Fathers

Beers with our Founding Fathers

 “I, however, place economy among the first and most

important Republican virtues, and public debt as the
greatest of the dangers to be feared.”

 “Our tenet ever was…that Congress had not unlimited
powers to provide for the general welfare, but were

restrained to those specifically enumerated; and that, as it
was never meant that they should provide for that welfare

but by the exercise of the enumerated powers, so it could
not have been meant they should raise money for purposes

which the enumeration did not place under their action.”
 “On every question of construction (of the Constitution) let

us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution

was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates,
and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of
the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one

in which it was passed.”

 “I consider trial by jury as the only anchor yet imagined by
man by which a government can be held to the principles of

its constitution.”
 “Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will

within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others.
I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’, because law is

often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the
rights of the individual.”

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