What the heck was going through their brains?

[99th_Monkey]

46. Those Founding Fathers had their heads so far up in the clouds

that they couldn't see 200 years into the future very clearly,
so they didn't understand where the real dangers lurked.

But a mere 56 years later, a French political thinker and historian
who visited America at the tender age of 26, had it all pretty much
figured out, and wrote this in his classic work Democracy in America:

"The manufacturing aristocracy of our age first impoverishes and then
debases the men who service it, and then abandons them to be supported
by the Charity of the public. ...

The friends of democracy should keep their eyes anxiously fixed in this
direction; for if ever a permanent inequality of conditions and aristocracy
again penetrate into the world, it may be predicted that this is the gate by
which they will enter". ~Alexis de Tocqueville (1832)