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"In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed, and in the next place, oblige it to control itself," wrote Alexander Hamilton, the nation's first Secretary of the Treasury. As a former military officer serving under George Washington in the American Revolution, Hamilton understood the importance of security as a function of government.

As a businessman and founder of the New York Post, Hamilton understood the role of government in creating an environment for economic growth and political freedom. Hamilton also understood that "Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been and ever will be pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit. In a society under the forms of which the stronger faction can readily unite and oppress the weaker, anarchy may as truly be said to reign as in a state of nature, where the weaker individual is not secured against the violence of the stronger; and as, in the latter state, even the individuals are prompted, by the uncertainty of their condition, to submit to a government which may protect the weak as well as themselves; so, in the former state, will the more powerful factions or parties be gradually induced, by a like motive to wish for a government which will protect all parties, the weaker as well as the more powerful."

Justice, however, did not spring merely from human laws. After emigrating to the American colonies, an 18-year-old Hamilton wrote his first major political tract. In The Farmer Refuted, Hamilton showed that he understood the precepts of natural law at a precocious age: "The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the Divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power."

The American Strategy of Alexander Hamilton is a focus of the Lehrman Institute - the promotion of economic prosperity, national security and personal liberty. These goals have grounded the research of The Lehrman Institute.

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