For its first 75 years, the United States was growing quickly but walking on eggshells as a “house divided” (Lincoln) between free and slave states. After the noble and terrible resolution of that problem, for 50 years mainly rather passive administrations let America be America. It tripled in population between the Civil War and First World War, and came to operate on a scale of economic activity and social fermentation that the world had never imagined to be possible. The United States now has before it the enormity of the corruption and license and incompetence of its political class. Thus, even through wildly improbable instruments of national destiny, do great peoples renovate their institutions.

Source: National Post November 04, 2016 18:29 UTC