As Charles Dickens wrote about Victorian England in A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

The American founders were acutely aware that human beings desire power. Like Lord Acton, they believed that power tends to have a corrupting effect on those not only who attain it but those who reach for it.

Over the past decades, the controversy over civics education in the United States has only gotten worse.

During the bleakest days of the Covid pandemic and the shutdowns, numerous voices exhorted us to practice kindness.

We do violence to a work of art by using it for our own ends, especially for our own ideological or political ends, which are time-bound and probably transient at best.

Professional golf may be the last sport to maintain a strong sense of manners.

George Washington died in 1799 a decade after the Constitution was ratified, and just two years after serving as the nation’s first President, elected for two full terms.

David French in this essay places alongside each other two contrasting thoughts of two contrasting thinkers—first friends, then enemies, then friends again—who were central figures in our nation’s early history.