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Library of Congress Politics (1857-1907)
“The process by which a nation was created and unified came at last to an end, and a still more fateful process began which was to determine its place and example in the general history of the world.”
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AP The Ideals of America
An address delivered on the one hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary of the battle of Trenton, December 26, 1901
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Democracy and Efficiency
“As we grow older, we grow also perplexed and awkward in the doing of justice and in the perfecting and safe-guarding of liberty. It is character and good principle ... which are to save us, if we are to escape disaster.”
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The Reconstruction of the Southern States
“The civil war had given leave to one set of revolutionary forces; Reconstruction gave leave to another still more formidable. The effects of the first were temporary ... the effects of the second were permanent, and struck to the very centre of our forms of government.”
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A Wit and a Seer
A celebration of the life and career of British writer and economist Walter Bagehot
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A Lawyer With a Style
Praise for the literary contributions of Sir Henry Maine
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On Being Human
“Once it was a simple enough matter to be a human being, but now it is deeply difficult; because life was once simple, but is now complex, confused, multifarious.”
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The Making of the Nation
“The past has made the present, and will make the future. It has made us a nation, despite a variety of life that threatened to keep us at odds amongst ourselves. ... It has taught us how to become strong, and will teach us, if we heed its moral, how to become wise, also, and single-minded.”
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Mr. Cleveland as President
“In him we got a President, as it were, by immediate choice from out the body of the people ... and he has refreshed our notion of an American chief magistrate.”
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A Literary Politician
“Occasionally, a man is born into the world whose mission it evidently is to clarify the thought of his generation, and to vivify it; to give it speed where it is slow, vision where it is blind, balance where it is out of poise, saving humor where it is dry, — and such a man was Walter Bagehot.”
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'Mere Literature'
“You can neither tell the story nor conceive the law till you know how the men you speak of regarded themselves and one another; and I know of no way of learning this but by reading the stories they have told of themselves, the songs they have sung, the heroic adventures they have conceived.”
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The Author Himself
"In every case of literary immortality there is present originative personality ... origination which takes its stamp and character from the originator, which is his substance given to the world, which is himself outspoken."
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Character of Democracy in the United States
“Successful democracy differs from unsuccessful in being a product of history, — a product of forces not suddenly become operative, but slowly working upon whole peoples for generations together.”
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Library of Congress Responsible Government Under the Constitution
“The question is not merely, How shall the methods of Congress be clarified and its ways made purposeful and responsible? There is this greater question at stake: How shall the essential arrangements of the Constitution be preserved?”
