Obligations to Posterity: Thoughts by Cato, 1787.

This is a short but interesting view about obligations that a generation has to posterity. The occasion of these remarks is the fight over the ratification of the Constitution. Cato, being among the Anti-Federalists, distrusted the Constitution vis-a-vis the Articles of Confederation.

August Glen-James, editor

. . . your posterity will find that great power connected with ambition, luxury, and flattery will as readily produce a Caesar, Caligula, Nero, and Domitian in America, as the same causes did in the Roman Empire.

You are then under a sacred obligation to provide for the safety of your posterity, and would you now basely desert their interests, when by a small share of prudence you may transmit to them a beautiful political patrimony, that will present the necessity of their traveling through seas of blood to obtain that, which your wisdom might have secured:—It is a duty you owe likewise to your own reputation, for you have a great name to lose; you are characterized as cautious, prudent and jealous in politics; whence is it therefore, that you are about to precipitate yourselves into a sea of uncertainty, and adopt a system so vague, and which has discarded so many of your valuable rights:—Is it because you do not believe that an American can be a tyrant? If this be the case you rest on a weak basis; Americans are like other men in similar situations, when the manners and opinions of the community are changed by the causes I mentioned before, and your political compact inexplicit, your posterity will find that great power connected with ambition, luxury, and flattery will as readily produce a Caesar, Caligula, Nero, and Domitian in America, as the same causes did in the Roman Empire.

—“Cato,” Nov. 27, 1787.