LAST DITCH OF DEMOCRACY - Majority Rights

If you can’t do it yourself, no one can do it for you. I may have been on
the wrong line quoting Brooks Adams, I mean about Sennacherib, and
the Shalmanaser, and the decline, that is flop, of the Babylonian empire?
May have been talkin’ over your heads. Possibly I ought to have come
nearer with a more familiar or homely example.
Say the Cumberland Turnpike, P. 344 in Bill Woodward’s A New
American History, published by Farrar and Rinehart. Or say The Erie
Canal, something you may have heard of. Well look it up in your copy of
Woodward, and meditate on his paragraphs; and then call the President
by his address. Bloomingdale’s gook house, or some establishment of
similar nature. The National Road, known as the Cumberland Turnpike,
funds raised by sale of lands in Ohio, broad highway was built from the
head of navigation on the Potomac to Wheeling Ohio. Officially called
National Road, popularly known as Cumberland Turnpike.
Baltimore and Philadelphia were the chief beneficiaries. Why? Cause a
trade route brings benefit to the trade centers. N.Y. slippin’ behind in
1817, ’cause OF the new trade route. Twelve thousand wagons arrivin’
in Philadelphia in 1817. And not to N.Y.
So what was done as an answer? The Erie Canal was the answer. 365
miles from Buffalo to the kapital of N.Y. state, Albany on the Hudson
River. Supposed to be longest canal in the world of that era. Mr. Adams
who is considered a more highbrow historian than the more cheerful and
inconsequent Woodward would have put down his foot and
EXPLAINED the passage, or correlated it to a general principle. As
indeed Woodward had done in his own mind before he selected those
items. Though he don’t make a splurge on the page, and assert a general
principle about trade routes: vortices of trade, vortices of civilization.
And ANY state department or executive that wasn’t fit for the gook
house, or an institution for the care of the feeble minded would have
done likewise. Hence I say diagnose him.