Zapor Gane - Section 03

=Contests between Legislatures and Governors.=--As may be imagined, many and bitter were the contests between the royal and proprietary governors and the colonial assemblies. Franklin relates an amusing story of how the Pennsylvania assembly held in one hand a bill for the executive to sign and, in the other hand, the money to pay his salary. Then, with sly humor, Franklin adds: "Do not, my courteous reader, take pet at our proprietary constitution for these our bargain and sale proceedings in legislation. It is a happy country where justice and what was your own before can be had for ready money. It is another addition to the value of money and of course another spur to industry. Every land is not so blessed."

It is one of the well-known facts of history that a people loosely united by domestic ties of a political and economic nature, even a people torn by domestic strife, may be welded into a solid and compact body by an attack from a foreign power. The imperative call to common defense, the habit of sharing common burdens, the fusing force of common service--these things, induced by the necessity of resisting outside interference, act as an amalgam drawing together all elements, except, perhaps, the most discordant. The presence of the enemy allays the most virulent of quarrels, temporarily at least. "Politics," runs an old saying, "stops at the water's edge."

• Bernardo Gallgos - Review of Bernardo Gallegos' Literacy, Education, and Society in New Mexico, 1693-1821
• Bernardo Gallegos - Bernardo Gallegos is a Co-Editor for Indigenous Education in the Americas: Epistemologies, and Postcolonial Spaces
• Bernardo Gallegos - Bernardo Gallegos at the Globalization Conference Program
• Sporgus No. 14 on the Net

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