I have seen England pass through three or four such critical seasons as I have described; through such seasons the United States will have to pass in the course of the next century, if not of this. How will you pass through them? I heartily wish you a good deliverance. But my reason and my wishes are at war, and 1 cannot help foreboding the worst.
Thomas Babington Macaulay – Letter to Secretary of State Henry S. Randall (1852)
The mas was right. Within 80 years we’d been had.