Dear General Washington,

By the constitution and activity of your army, I trust that your Excellency is as well concerned with the weakened moral and intellectual condition of our republic. I remain ever loyal to your motives, but will you permit me to articulate some doubts that I have upon your current methods?

Modern America is ill-suited for the Chickasaw tactics which you have employed, though I admire your raid upon Mr. Lauer; I too viewed the Commander in Chief forum and the recent debates and I have been thus afflicted for several weeks by fever and violent rheumatic pains.

What the nation requires rather is a fundamental adjustment to its pluralistic structure. The masses are turbulent and ever-changing. They seldom judge or determine right, and at present there are too many opinions proffered, too many choices, too much of democracy.

This Monday last in Poughkeepsie, I requested a coffee at a tavern of great repute but the wench assaulted me with innumerable questions in English and Italian. Do you believe that citizens today are of such great intellectual competence that they can ably manage so much? Evidence suggests they are not. Rather I fear that the abundance of selection in America has deteriorated their capacity for serious inspection of any single choice.

I am charmed by the extension of universal suffrage in modern America, the well born and gentry given no preference over women, half-bloods or the indigent. But the extension as well to the mindless masses has permitted a state of impudence and intellectual decay. For a choice of such import, should there not be a test to determine intellectual competence?

If it were probable that every man would give his vote free of willful ignorance, then, upon the true theory and genuine principles of liberty, every citizen, however stupid, should have a vote. But since that can hardly be expected, all popular states should be obliged to establish certain qualifications, whereby, some who are suspected to have a significant level of willful ignorance are excluded from voting; in order to set those willed towards competence on a level with each other.

I thus humbly request a rendezvous with your Excellency at your nearest opportunity to detail this test of willful ignorance for your assistance in national implementation. It will make me singularly happy if your wishes correspond with mine, as I have the honor to be your Excellency’s most obedient servant,

Alexander Hamilton

p.s. If you are available for the next debate, I humbly request your company in its viewing. As evidence of the necessity of an examination of willful ignorance, please consult the interwebbed page, www.belfiestick.com.