ABSTRACT
Children, in truth, have far more common sense than all too many adults. The world is as sick as ever: psychopaths run countries, killing their own citizens with chlorine and mustard gas—never mind showing any mercy to innocents abroad—and thugs, emboldened by quasi-religious quackery, butcher children for fun and profit, when they don't merrily blow themselves up for promised pleasures in the afterlife. Hamilton distrusted the impulse, prevalent among politicians, to demonstrate "unqualified complaisance to every sudden breeze of passion or to every transient impulse which the people may receive from the arts of men, who flatter their prejudices to betray their interests". To put it in medical terms, the medicine that people need may not be what tastes best. Beware of demagogues peddling snake oil in containers of overheated rhetoric. Gaudily clad in the attire of grandiloquent patriotism, a messianic rhetoric cheapens the truly great rational principles for which the nation had been painstakingly established.
