Tea at Trianon: America's Decade of Decline

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, December 31, 2009

America's Decade of Decline

Looking back at the first ten years of the new millennium. (Via Joshua Snyder) Share

1 comment:

Julygirl said...: Good article, but no solutions. There is a belief that government can create wealth. It can't. It can redistribute wealth, but it can't create it as a private sector can. Stimulus programs can be compared to using a pail to move water from one end of a pool to another. This is how wealth is produced; individuals seek to meet their own needs by meeting the needs and wants of others. They create businesses that produce innovations and in the process create economic growth. There are greedy individuals in a free market society (as well as other societies), but the failure of the free market was the result of bad government actions. The two greatest economic disasters of the 20th century...the Great Depression of the 1930's and the Great Inflation of the 1970's were the result of the catastrophic government mistakes, not a sudden failure of free-market capitalism.; December 31, 2009 at 11:51:00 AM EST