But how many people believe in such things today as compared to how many want the government to nanny them cradle to grave? \
Ah, but look at it in reverse. How many back then didn't bother themselves with such things in the same manner as people do today? Going with willingness of military service as a crude and probably thoroughly unscientific benchmark for a set of values that I'll arbitrarily label "patriotism" we are looking at roughly the same number of people. If I recall, only about 3% of the population actively participated in the revolutionary war at any given time, with about 8% of the total population having participated over the entire course of the war. Currently 8% of the national population are Veterans. If we focus solely on the number of them that joined voluntarily after discontinuing the draft we see a number closer to the three percent mark with one percent of the population both on active duty and reserve at any given time.
My own blithe and likely unfounded and indefensible comparisons aside, I again direct my attention to MB's statement that late 18th century Americans wholly held no values contemporary to the modern American. Such is to assume an absolute and total abandonment and separation from the basic tenets of justice and freedom, in addition to a wide array of righteous morals and ethics that comprised the common revolutionary era gentleman and at the most basic level even an extant sense of right and wrong. The simple fact that anyone here is at all defending the connection of the mores of newly founded 18th century Americana with modernity is itself proof that such an absolute assertion is false and the flame of those most sincere of axioms still flickers, however dimly, with a most obstinate intransigence to utter extinguishment.
