Quotation of the Day…

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… is from a 19th-century U.S. Secretary of the Interior and U.S. Senator from Missouri, Carl Schurz (1829-1906), an immigrant from Germany to America, as quoted on page 582 of the late Yale Brozen‘s superb 1965 essay “The Revival of Traditional Liberalism” (available without charge on-line here) as it appears in Liberty Fund’s 1981 single-volume collection of New Individualist Review (ellipses original to Brozen):

Here in America you can see how slightly a people needs to be governed….. Here are governments, but no rulers – governors, but they are clerks. All the great educational establishments, the churches, the great means of transportation, etc., that are being organized here – almost all of these things owe their existence not to official authority, but to the spontaneous cooperation of private individuals. It is only here that you realize how superfluous governments are in many affairs in which, in Europe, they are considered entirely indispensable, and how the opportunity of doing something inspires a desire to do it.