Quotes from A. David Moody

and powerful towards both the people and the state. He reaffirms the basic cause of 'our revolution', No taxation without representation; he insists that government revenue 'be kept under public control' and not be given over to the banks to speculate with; and he endorses President Jackson's saying 'No where so well deposited as in the pants of the people, | Wealth ain't'.

THE SANE METHOD OF STUDYING HISTORY consists (or wd. if it were ever practised, consist) in learning what certain great protagonists intended, and to what degree they failed in forcing their program on the mass. For example:…J. Q. Adams' intention of conserving national wealth for purposes of national education and civilization… Jefferson's continual struggle to import civilization from Europe (getting measurements of la Maison Carrée…)

The democratic idea', he had pointed out, 'was not that legislative bodies shd. represent the momentary idiocy of the multitude.

the democratic idea' would not necessarily lead to the idea of 'the great protagonist' either; and further, that 'the great protagonists' in the 1930s would be, not a Jefferson or an Adams, but Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler.

An aristocracy often dictates, it rules as long as it is composed of the strongest elements i.e. as long as it maintains its sense of the present. One might almost say as long as it maintains its news sense. Both the communist party in Russia and the Fascist party in Italy are examples of aristocracy, active. They are the best, the pragmatical, the aware, the most thoughtful, the most wilful elements in their nations.

He had recorded in canto 8 how Plato the Idealist 'went to Dionysius of Syracuse | Because he had observed that tyrants | Were most efficient in all that they set their hands to'; but had he taken the point of the story, that Plato found 'he was unable to persuade Dionysius to any amelioration'?

Olga Rudge told a story about Wanda Landowska, the renowned harpsichordist. Landowska had been interrupted in mid-sentence by the arrival of friends and a fuss about tickets, and had come back after a quarter of an hour and continued her sentence from where she left off. 'Is it the working with different voices in the fugues etc. makes her able to keep all the threads in her hand separate and distinct?', Olga wondered, 'like in a way the cantos?

Said Mr RothSchild, hell knows which Roth-schild 1861, '64 or there sometime, 'Very few people 'will understand this. Those who do will be occupied 'getting profits. The general public will probably not 'see it's against their interest.

breaking of the celebratory mood. For George Kearns, one of the most perceptive of Pound's readers

with large trunk full of highbrow books (Spengler etc.)', and Pound read The Decline of the West 'in return for tips on XV century'. He told his father that 'As S. seems to mean by "The West" a lot of things I dislike, I shd. like to accept his infantine belief that they are "declining"';

Never has been a LONG hortatory poem', Pound advised John Hargrave, the leader of the Green Shirts, a militant wing of Social Credit: 'Epic…is not incitement to IMMEDIATE act/ you tell the tale to direct the auditor toward admiration of certain nobilities, courage etc.' Or, putting it another way, this time to Basil Bunting as a fellow poet, 'The poet's job is to define and yet again define till the detail of surface is in accord with the root in justice.

the principles of Jeffersonian democracy, principles which he still steadfastly defended— The world, the flesh, the devils in hell are Against any man who now in the North American Union shall dare to join the standard of Almighty God to put down the African slave trade…

An early reviewer of Cantos XXXI–XLI in the New York Nation amused himself with the conceit of Mr Pound taking correspondence courses in such subjects as 'History of the U.S. Treasury from the Revolution to the Civil War (from the Original Documents)' and making notes diligently on small pieces of paper which a gust of wind scattered over the hills about Rapallo, and which he then picked up and sent to the printer as he found them.

That is of course a purely eighteenth-century, patriarchal, and un-Native American model of civilization. One might even call it European, if it were not that the monarchical European way, in Jefferson's view, was 'to keep [the people] down' by hard labour, poverty, ignorance