A Word from a Founding Father

Between our work writing about the performing arts and the insane popularity of the Broadway smash Hamilton this season, it seems only appropriate to quote Alexander Hamilton on this Independence Day.

Here, he’s writing in the Federalist Papers, in 1787, arguing for the ratification of the Constitution, but his words still apply in the summer of 2016:

It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force. If there be any truth in the remark, the crisis at which we are arrived may with propriety be regarded as the era in which that decision is to be made; and a wrong election of the part we shall act may, in this view, deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of mankind. 
--Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist Papers