Will 90-year-old history be repeated?

I hadn't planned to write a 'cuff this week but the approaching (and underway) change in our nation's governing body seems reason enough to reprint an article that appeared on the front page of the Gravette New Herald 93 years ago, on August 3, 1923. It was written by W. J. Marley, of Bentonville, and first appeared in the Fort Smith Southwest American.

I do not know Mr. Marley's background, whether a politician, a businessman or a farmer. However, his words seem appropriate for today's politicians (not statesmen) as they did for the same body a few years preceding the real great depression.

I know our culture, our wants, our needs and our values are different from that day so long ago. But as our National Debt today approaches, or may have reached, the $20,000,000,000 mark (that's trillion), are Mr. Marley's well-chosen words worth hearing? Read them:

"Please allow me a few observations upon the question of federal aid. Federal aid is indeed enticing when you give it but a superficial consideration, but a proved delusion when given a thorough investigation.

"It is indisputable that the government has nothing in the way of finances to donate to the people except the money which it has previously received at the hands of the people through the different channels of the national revenues system. If through federal aid, a state receives, for any purpose, more than a reimbursement, or more than fair share of the previous contributions to the government treasury, then it must necessarily be at the expense of her sister states; while if in the like manner a state receives no more than a reimbursement of its previous contributions to the general government, then it finds itself duped. Why should any self-respecting state consent to play the role of either dupe or robber? From an economical standpoint, it is reasonable to contend that a state may make bigger and possibly better improvements under this system of government aid, although the state must be cajoled into spending her own money. So much then for the economical phase of the question.

"It is my humble opinion there are fundamental principles involved in this question that far outweigh any question of economics. I am most sanguine that it is true that when a fundamental principle of government is violated for any purpose, no matter how good that purpose may seem to be, thereby is the body politic infected with a poison that must eventually do incalculable harm.

"It will not be denied that the federal government is steadily encroaching upon what many people conceive to be their constitutional liberties, and beyond a single doubt the system and practice of federal aid is largely responsible for the conditions.

"From all accounts there are hordes of federal aid lobbyists constantly on guard at Washington whose chief aim is to induce the congress to appropriate large sums of the people's money for all manner of purposes, seemingly unmindful of the fact that the people must foot the bills. In their blind zeal to initiate and foster enterprises for the states that the states should initiate and carry out for themselves, they would subvert our republic and make it instead a bureaucratic government, a system of government which was the beginning of the end of all democracies of the past ages.

"Are we to profit from the history of the failures of past democracies or, from the same destructive causes by which they perished, let ours perish from the earth?"

My take: The old saying, "History does repeat itself certainly seems at least partially true today in Mr. Marley's well chosen words. For as we drift, at increasing speed, to becoming a socialist state, who, or what, is going to pay that mountainous debt? Or fill the bottomless pit in which we will find ourselves? Will our lawmakers listen?

Dodie Evans is the former owner and long-time editor of the Gravette News Herald. Opinions expressed are those of the author.

Editorial on 01/18/2017