“The spirit of improvement is abroad upon the earth. It stimulates the heart and sharpens the faculties not of our fellow-citizens alone, but of the nations of Europe and of their rulers. While dwelling with pleasing satisfaction upon the superior excellence of our political institutions, let us not be unmindful that liberty is power: that the nation blessed with the largest portion of liberty must, in proportion to its numbers, be the most powerful nation on earth, and that the tenure of power by man is, in the moral purpose of his Creator, upon condition that it shall be exercised to ends of benificence, to improve the condition of himself and his fellow men.” – John Quincy Adams, 1825 Address to Congress (in P. Johnson, The Birth of the Modern, 61)

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