Diderot's "Apostrophe to the Insurgents," 1782

The "insurgents" in question were the "founding fathers" of our era, the men and women who rose up against royalist tyranny and sought to make the ideals of the Enlightenment a true and living thing, the soul of a new country. That country today looks nothing like the land of Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin. Diderot's dream of a revolutionary America, fighting "unequal distribution of wealth, extravagance, indolence, and corruption" and protecting human liberty, this dream is over.

"After centuries of oppression, may the revolution which has just taken place across the sea, by offering to all the inhabitants of Europe asylum against fanaticism and tyranny, teach those who govern men about the legitimate use of their authority! May those courageous Americans, who preferred to see their wives assaulted, their children butchered, their homes destroyed, their fields ravaged, their towns burned, to spill their blood and to die, rather than lose even a tiny portion of their liberty, prevent the enormous growth and the unequal distribution of wealth, extravagance, indolence, and corruption, and guarantee the maintenance of their liberty and the duration of their government. May they defer (at least for several centuries), the judgment pronounced against all the things of this world, the judgment which condemned them to have their birth, their period of strength, their decrepitude, and their end.

"Adversity employs great talents; prosperity renders them useless and carries the inept, the corrupted wealthy and the wicked to the top. May they bear in mind that virtue often contains the seeds of tyranny. May they bear in mind that it is neither gold nor even a multitude of arms that sustains a state, but its morals. May each of them keep in his house, in a corner of his field, next to his workbench, next to his plow, his gun, his sword and his bayonet. May they all be soldiers. May they bear in mind that in circumstances where deliberation is possible, the advice of old men is good, but that in moments of crisis youth is generally better informed than its elders."