Politics & Power Quote by Henry Knox

The line lands like a veteran’s eye-roll at armchair critics. Knox is talking about the kind of outsider - geographically distant, politically removed - who “admires” a government in the abstract, then condemns it the moment reality shows up as a bill. The phrase “systems of government unfounded in nature” is the tell: he’s not praising lofty constitutional theory, he’s warning against it. If your political design isn’t built on what people actually do (hoard, evade, grumble, resist), it will collapse into blame-shifting, with rulers taking the heat for predictable human behavior.

Knox writes as a soldier, and the subtext is logistical, not philosophical. Armies don’t run on ideals; they run on supplies, pay, and the coercive competence of the state. In the post-Revolutionary context - a young republic struggling with war debt, weak federal revenue under the Articles of Confederation, and popular hostility to taxation - “taxes assessed too high and collected too rigidly” isn’t an academic complaint. It’s the kind of grievance that fuels unrest and makes governance look illegitimate.

What makes the sentence work is its quiet inversion of sympathy. It sounds like he’s about to defend taxpayers; instead, he critiques the romantic spectator who wants a minimalist state and a maximal outcome. Knox is sketching an early American paradox: citizens celebrate liberty, then recoil when liberty’s price tag arrives, and distant admirers treat that recoil as proof of tyranny rather than the cost of building a functioning government.