Politics & Power Quote by Ralph A. Cram

There’s a deliberate bait-and-switch in Cram’s sentence: “republicanism,” the ideology we’re trained to associate with leveling and popular sovereignty, is framed as an aristocratic counterstrike. He’s not praising the people; he’s rescuing hierarchy. The “new and very evil thing” is left conveniently unnamed, a rhetorical blank that lets the reader supply whatever modern menace they already fear: industrial capitalism, mass democracy, secularism, immigration, “the mob.” That vagueness is the point. It turns political critique into a mood.

Cram’s most revealing phrase is “aristocracy of race, character and tradition.” It’s a three-part escalation from moral virtue (“character”) to inherited legitimacy (“tradition”) to the ugliest claim of all (“race”), smuggled in as if it were just another tasteful attribute. He’s constructing a fantasy of natural leadership: a class that deserves authority not because it argues well or governs well, but because it is. “Fast perishing” adds a martyr’s glow, casting elite decline as tragedy rather than accountability.

Context matters: Cram was a leading Gothic Revival architect, and this line reads like his architectural politics. Gothic, for him, wasn’t just a style; it was a social program, a yearning for pre-industrial order, disciplined craftsmanship, and Christian coherence against the churn of modernity. Eighteenth-century republicanism becomes, in this telling, less a revolution than a last, elegant attempt by a dying caste to steer change without surrendering control.