The American Crisis: Defined
Journal Entry #4
…It has been frequently remarked, that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force…

My Dear & Most Excellent Publius:
How wonderfully, and with a felicitous economy of words, you have encapsulated the very kernel of the American Cause. In your essays you sought, despite various literary flaws (though I am personally hard pressed to find any), to “promote the cause of truth, and lead to a right judgment of the true interests of the community.”

In arguing for the adoption of the Constitution proposed by the Philadelphia Convention in 1787- no doubt a most rigorous struggle- you were aided by the prevailing sentiment held by citizens of goodwill: that Truth and Reason are real and indispensable standards by which legitimate and efficacious government should be conceived.

Today, the citizens of this great Republic you and your colleagues so tirelessly labored to establish, have come largely under the sway of a most dangerous sophistry. Advanced by the 18th century Enlightenment writers of the French Encyclopedie (1751-65), d’Holbach’s Systeme de la nature (1770), and the Positivism of Auguste Comte (1798-1857), these ideas combined to eradicate all notions of objective and absolute Truth, as well as Reason that went beyond the “testimony of observation and experience”.

Certainly, Thomas Paine’s celestial article of FREEDOM and such estimations of value as Heaven might render would- at the hands of the French philosophes- fall into disrepute, being exemplars of clericalism, a priori or metaphysical speculations and, therefore, hostile to the more progressive doctrines of naturalism and materialism. I shall continue to keep you informed of these events through the Committees of Correspondence.

I am, as always, Your Sincere Friend & Brother in the American Cause of FREEDOM-
Montag.