On the recordJuly 12, 2012
Mark Helprin is an author who was educated at Harvard, Oxford, Princeton, Columbia, having also served in the British Merchant Navy and Israeli Military. I will simply convey his words in an article first printed in Hillsdale College's Imprimis 3 years before 9/11 propelled us into the realization that we had been at war for over 20 years, but only the other side knew it was a war, and also before we knew how crushing and debilitating our enormous debt would be and has become. I've shortened the words a bit and provided them here as they express my heart more exquisitely than my own written words could: When letters took a month by sea and the records of the United States Government could be moved in a single wagon pulled by two horses, we had great statesmanship. We had men of integrity and genius: Washington, Hamilton, Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Monroe. These were men who were in love with principle, as if it were an art, which in their practice they made it. They studied empires that had fallen for the sake of doing what was right in a small country that had barely risen and were able to see things so clearly that they surpassed in greatness each and every one of the classical models that they had approached in awe.…





