Subject: Letters Date: Sun, 29 Oct 2000 21:57:36 -0600 From: "Armond C. Simmons" Organization: SIMMONSPORT To: "U.S. News" I think it's appropriate that we revisit a discussion of the "democracy life span" especially as we witness the end of it's sequence --- When the thirteen colonies were still a part of England, Professor Alexander Tyler, a Scottish historian, wrote about the fall of the Athenian Republic over 2000 years earlier. He wrote: "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's great civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage." Armond "Si" Simmons 104 Wadsworth Lane Pell City, AL 35128 205 338 7378 205 812 9085 fax 603 737 0833 psysim@voy.net http://earth.vol.com/~psysim/dustoff.htm http://members.tripod.com/psysim/msvn.html