A capitalist society requires certain preconditions. Among other things, it must establish a rule of law through enforceable contracts; respect private property; create a trustworthy bureaucracy to ar...
The feckless President Buchanan, who opposed secession, thought the federal government powerless to stop it, and in his last annual message blamed the incessant and violent agitation of the slavery qu...
No etiquette yet defined civilized behavior between the parties.
Explaining that he did so from a desire of testifying
Hamilton wanted to restrain abusive majorities and minorities.
If you go back to the time of J.P. Morgan, the world of high finance was completely wholesale. The prestigious investment banks on Wall Street appealed exclusively to large corporations, governments,...
Where revolutions, by their nature, resisted excess government power, the opposite situation could be equally hazardous. As too much power leads to despotism, too little leads to anarchy, and both eve...
The British were unhinged by the colonists' unorthodox fighting style and shocking failure to abide by gentlemanly rules of engagement. One scandalized British soldier complained that the American rif...
The immorality of slavery became patently clear that spring. He had acquired from Colonel Dent the mulatto slave named William Jones who had worked on Dent’s farm and was now thirty-five years old. It...
In number 65, Hamilton visualized, with exceptional
Errors once discovered are more than half amended,
Willful waste makes woeful want.
Hamilton wanted his central bank to be profitable enough to attract private investors while serving the public interest. He knew the composition of its board would be an inflammatory issue. Directors...
Hamilton dreaded parties as the most fatal disease of popular governments and hoped America could dispense with such groups.7 James Kent later wrote, Hamilton said in The Federalist, in his speeches,...
Sinister glow. The jury will mark every muscle of
The free school is the promoter of that intelligence which is to preserve us as a free nation. If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividi...
Only a free press could check abuses of executive power, Hamilton asserted.
Machiavelli’s The Prince and Plutarch’s Lives,
He became known for breaking in wild horses for local farmers, a sight that drew admiring spectators to the village square. He tamed even the most refractory horses through a fine sensitivity to their...
From later descriptions, however, we know that [Alexander Hamilton] stood about five foot seven and had a fair complexion, auburn hair, rosy cheeks, and a wide, well-carved mouth. His nose, with its f...