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or immediate self-promotion. That may be mixed up in it too, but they are emotions that are related with aspirations to something or other. That sort of relates them to each other. Just look at the speeches at a convention. The speeches that get the house are those speeches that bear on these things which they commonly aspire to, and not to the appeal of the “full dinner pail,” or “this will put money in the bank,” or “this will promote the economy of our country” and so forth and so on. That is not what gets the real following.
I have the really deep impression that among the Southern Democrats there has always been a large amount of great aspiration for a democratic and a welfare way of life - a life in which everybody has a good life. A good many of the political philosophers of the early days of the country were southern gentlemen planters. Thomas Jefferson's writings are a case in point. He thought in terms of an aspiration to a good life. I admit, of course, that they didn't always see the problem of human slavery in its setting. They didn't see it in its relation to this aspiration any more than the Greeks did in the years of the great republic. The great years of Greece were the years when the whole society was based on a slave system. Read their speeches and read their works and it doesn't even filter through that they noticed
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