Listening to Michael Schiavo's lawyer George Felos expatiate on Terri Schiavo's last hours and the scrupulous attention to judicial punctilio which, in Felos' telling of it, led up to them, I was reminded of a passage from Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. Tocqueville, writing about the legislative extirpation of the Creek and Cherokee Indians in the 1830's, says this:
"...[T]he conduct of the United States...toward the natives was inspired by the most chaste affection for legal formalities....The Spaniards, by unparalleled atrocities which brand them with indelible shame, did not succeed in exterminating the Indian race and could not even prevent them from sharing their rights; the...Americans have attained both these results with wonderful ease, quietly, legally, and philanthropically, without spilling blood and without violating a single one of the great principles of morality in the eyes of the world. It is impossible to destroy men with more respect to the laws of humanity."
Tocqueville could have been writing, mutatis mutandis, about the judicial extirpation of Terri Schiavo.
RLC
