Note the publish date, 1947, and historically, about the Adams Administration era, 1797-1801, then compare with the same underlying problems we confront in American politics today.
I’ll be doing a series on Themes in the American Apologetics series in upcoming weeks. How we think about the Enemy today, and how little we can do to change their thinking, should be a subject that concerns us, for one, being so predicable, it should teach us that if we complain about the daily rise and setting of the sun, our problem is within ourselves.
To my mind, we are engaged in a war in which we are still only 50% engaged.
From the first two paragraphs of Kenneth Robert’s last novel, Lydia Bailey, 1947, only slightly edited.
I’m not over-enthusiastic about books that teach or preach, but I may as well admit in the beginning that my primary reason for writing this book was to teach as many as possible of those who come after me how much hell and ruin are inevitably brought on innocent people and countries by men who make a virtue of consistency.
All the great and small villains whom I met in the events I’m about to set down were consistent men—-unimaginative men who consistently believed in war as a means in settling disputes; equally misguided men who consistently believed that war must be avoided at all hazards; narrow men who consistently upheld the beliefs of one political party and saw no good in any other; shortsighted men who consistently refused to see that the welfare of their own nation was dependent upon the welfare of every other nation; ignorant men who consistently thought that the policies of their own government should be supported and followed whether those policies were right or wrong; dangerous men who consistently thought that al lpeople with black skins are inferior to those with white skins; intolerant men who consistently believed that all people with white skins should be forced to accept all people with black skins as equals.
And I know I know that any nation that cannot or will not avoid the dreadful pitfalls of consistency will be the one with the dead empires whose crumbling monuments studded our battlegrounds……(in Haiti and Africa).
This story began with the fallout of the Alien and Sedition Acts in America during John Adams’ term, and ended in Haiti with the Slave Revolt of 1804, and how the slaves of Haiti gained very little from it, something of a foretaste of the independence movements in colonial Africa since the 1950s.
A simple consideration. Good lessons all around.
