Leadership Quote by Alexander Hamilton

Hamilton is doing something sly here: he turns “subsistence” into the real ballot box. Strip away the lofty talk of rights and representation and he’s pointing at the lever that actually moves people - the ability to eat, to work, to keep a roof. If someone else controls that, your “will” becomes a performance, not a choice.

The phrasing matters. “In the general course of human nature” is Hamilton’s way of preempting moral objections. He’s not accusing individuals of cowardice; he’s describing a predictable mechanism. Hunger and dependency don’t just create hardship, they create compliance. By framing it as human nature, he makes the argument feel less like partisan paranoia and more like engineering: design a system that assumes pressure will be applied, because pressure always is.

The subtext is a warning about political capture through economics. In the late-18th-century American context, Hamilton is arguing for institutional arrangements that prevent any one faction - a legislature, a local majority, a patron class - from holding citizens or officeholders hostage through pay, property, or access to livelihoods. It echoes recurring fights of the founding era: who funds the government, who controls appointments, who can punish dissent through economic retaliation.

The line also reveals Hamilton’s hardheaded view of freedom: it’s not just the absence of chains; it’s insulation from coercion that arrives in the polite form of a paycheck. In modern terms, he’s diagnosing why “voluntary” consent can be structurally compromised long before anyone breaks a law.