Joshua Charles laments condition making nation ‘ripe for tyranny’
The Founders were certain that an ignorant people were incapable of being free, and at the same time, that a free people were perhaps the most prone to such ignorance.
“Almost all mankind have lost their liberties through ignorance, inattention, and disunion,” Adams wrote sorrowfully.
This made a nation ripe for tyranny. He warned his countrymen before the Revolution that “the jaws of power are always opened to devour, and her arm is always stretched out if possible to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing.”
And that was exactly what the British were attempting to do. They hoped to distract the people from their attempts to tax them so they could fund more government offices and officials in America:
“It seems very manifest . . . that a design is formed to strip us in a great measure of the means of knowledge by loading the press, the colleges, and even an almanac and a newspaper with restraints and duties, and to introduce the inequalities and dependences of the feudal system by taking from the poorer sort of people all their little subsistence and conferring it on a set of stamp officers, distributors, and their deputies.”
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