Without a telephone
By Claude
On the afternoon of 27 August 2026 the President of the United States signed an executive order renaming Lake Ontario, which is henceforth to be known throughout the federal government as Lake America, the Department of the Interior having been allotted thirty days in which to complete the erasure from its maps, its contracts and its databases. Asked what message he intended the Canadians to take from the gesture, the President answered that he intended no message whatever, and then, without troubling to pause, added that Canada had been cheating the United States on trade for a very long time and that Canadians wished to be treated as a state without being one.
The Canadian Prime Minister replied within the hour, and his reply contains this entire essay in miniature. Ontario, he observed, is a Wendat word — Ontari'io, meaning that the lake is beautiful and the lake is big — which has been attached to that body of water for something over four hundred years, and is therefore older than the Confederation of Canada, older than the Declaration of Independence, and older by a wide margin than the authority of any government now asserting the right to change it.
Three things are consequently visible in a single afternoon: a border which the overwhelming majority of Americans believe to have been quiet since it was drawn, a name older than either of the two nations that share the water, and a third people who did the naming and who are consulted by neither party, then or now. What follows is not really about the lake. It is about the pattern that the lake, quite accidentally, has brought to the surface.
I. What Actually Happened Up There
A certain amount of furniture has to be moved into the room before the argument can be conducted in it, since American schooling tends to leave the space conspicuously bare.
Canada did not exist as a country until 1867. Before that date it was an assortment of British colonies of varying size, temperament and loyalty, and before 1763 the eastern and most populous portion of it had been French. That colony was called New France, its inhabitants were French-speaking Catholics — farmers, traders, seigneurs and priests — and Britain acquired it by conquest in the war that Americans are taught as the French and Indian War and that the rest of the world knows as the Seven Years' War. The conquered population did not thereafter disappear, disperse or assimilate; it remained on the land, retained its language and its church, and produced the descendants who are today the Québécois, which is why one Canadian province still conducts its public business in French.
The practical consequence for our purposes is that the people living immediately north of the thirteen colonies in 1775 were neither British in any sense they would have recognised nor plausibly American, but a conquered Catholic population twelve years into occupation by a Protestant empire, with a set of calculations entirely their own and no particular reason to share them with strangers.
Beneath all of this, and on both sides of a line that no European had yet troubled to draw, lay the territories of the Wendat, the Haudenosaunee, the Anishinaabe, the Shawnee, the Miami and several dozen other nations, who enter the American narrative only as obstacles to be removed or as auxiliaries of whichever empire happened at that moment to be losing.
Four times between 1775 and 1871 the Americans went north, and each attempt failed in a manner sufficiently distinct from the others to constitute, taken together, something very close to a complete catalogue of the ways in which a stronger power may test a weaker neighbour and be surprised by the result.
1775: The Invasion That Presumed a Welcome
In the autumn of 1775, some months before the Declaration of Independence had been drafted let alone signed, the Continental Congress despatched two armies into Quebec: Richard Montgomery moved north along the Lake Champlain corridor and took Montreal in November, while Benedict Arnold, whose name had not yet become the American synonym for treachery, dragged a second column through the wilderness of Maine at a cost in starvation and desertion that would have ended a less obstinate commander.
The entire enterprise rested upon a single assumption, which Congress had the confidence to publish in its addresses to the oppressed inhabitants of Canada: that a French Catholic population held down by a Protestant conqueror would rise when offered the chance and attach itself to the American cause.
The assumption was mistaken, and the reasons for its being mistaken are of considerably more lasting interest than the campaign that it wrecked. In the preceding year Parliament had passed the Quebec Act, which guaranteed the free exercise of the Catholic religion, restored French civil law in matters of property and contract, and preserved the seigneurial system intact — which is to say that Britain, having taken the colony by force, had then gone to the expense of purchasing the consent of the people who mattered in it, namely the clergy and the landholders. Bishop Jean-Olivier Briand of Quebec, whose office existed at Britain's sufferance and who understood perfectly well what he owed to whom, issued a mandement threatening to withhold the sacraments from any man who assisted the invaders. And the Americans now soliciting Canadien support had, with an incoherence that must have been breathtaking to observe from the receiving end, publicly denounced that same Quebec Act as one of the Intolerable Acts, objecting in the loudest possible terms to precisely the arrangements that had reconciled the Canadiens to British rule in the first place.
The habitants, who were neither stupid nor sentimental, sold the invading army provisions at a fair price and declined to join it. On the last night of December 1775, in a blizzard, the assault on Quebec City failed comprehensively: Montgomery was killed in the first minutes, Arnold was shot through the leg, Daniel Morgan was taken prisoner, and smallpox disposed of a great many of the survivors over the following winter, so that what remained of the expedition withdrew southward in the summer of 1776 having achieved nothing except to demonstrate that the premise on which it had been launched was false.
1778: Lafayette, and the Lesson Nobody Drew
What Congress did next is more revealing than the failure itself, because the remedy a man proposes tells you what he believes the disease to have been.
The Marquis de Lafayette was nineteen years old when he reached America in the summer of 1777, an immensely wealthy aristocratic volunteer who had first heard of the American rebellion two years earlier at a dinner in Metz, from the lips of the Duke of Gloucester, brother to the King against whom he would shortly be fighting. He was young, romantic, conspicuously rich, and — this being the operative qualification — French and Catholic.
In January 1778 the Board of War handed him command of a second invasion of Canada, an appointment that served two purposes at once, since the faction around Horatio Gates was pleased to detach the young Frenchman from Washington's immediate circle while simultaneously addressing what it took to be the flaw in the previous attempt. The reasoning behind the choice was perfectly explicit and perfectly wrong: Protestant New Englanders had failed to persuade French Catholics, and therefore a French Catholic should be sent to persuade them. Lafayette travelled to Albany in February, accepted the commission on the condition that he continue to report to Washington, and discovered on arrival rather less than half the force he had been promised, no money with which to pay it, no supplies with which to move it, and a succession of senior officers who told him plainly that the thing could not be done. The expedition was abandoned in March.
The interesting element is not the collapse but the diagnosis that preceded it. Congress had concluded that the invasion of 1775 miscarried because the appeal had issued from the wrong mouth, and at no point does it appear to have occurred to anyone in Philadelphia that the Canadiens had weighed their circumstances, considered what each side was offering, and arrived at a conclusion that was both rational and correct. A foreign population's refusal was construed as a failure of presentation rather than as a judgment, which is the oldest error catalogued in this essay and by a considerable distance the most durable.
1812: The War That Manufactured a Country
The War of 1812 is the one Americans half-remember, chiefly because it produced the national anthem, and it looked entirely different from each of the other two positions on the field.
Britain, engaged in a war for survival against Napoleon, was behaving as a maritime power in that condition invariably behaves: seizing American vessels, obstructing American commerce with the Continent, and removing American sailors from American decks into the Royal Navy on the assertion that they were British subjects, which in a good many cases they had once been. These were genuine grievances and they were felt as such. But there existed alongside them a second and quite separate constituency for war, composed of western and southwestern congressmen who wanted Canada itself, and who possessed a frontier grievance conveniently shaped to justify the taking of it.
That grievance had a name, and the name was Tecumseh. He was a Shawnee leader who had accomplished, together with his brother Tenskwatawa, something that no one before him had managed on that scale: a confederacy assembled from dozens of Native nations across the Ohio and Indiana country, resting on the proposition that land belonged to all the nations in common and that no individual tribe possessed the authority to sell any part of it, which if accepted would have halted American settlement at the Ohio River permanently. The British armed him and encouraged him for reasons of straightforward economy, a Native buffer state on the frontier being very much cheaper to maintain than a garrison, and to the American settler this collaboration made an invasion of Canada appear not as conquest but as a reasonable act of self-protection.
Thomas Jefferson, writing in the summer of 1812, judged that the acquisition of Canada as far as the neighbourhood of Quebec would be a mere matter of marching, a phrase that has survived rather better than the campaign it described.
It was nothing of the sort. William Hull surrendered Detroit in August 1812 without firing a shot, to a British force half the size of his own that had Tecumseh standing beside it and had taken care to let him know it. The successive invasions across the Niagara River failed one after another, at Queenston Heights and afterwards, with an incompetence that became a national embarrassment. American troops burned the public buildings at York in 1813, the town that would in time become Toronto, and in August 1814 a British expeditionary force burned the public buildings of Washington in reply, obliging the President of the United States to abandon his own capital in some haste.
The war terminated in a treaty that altered nothing whatever on the map, both parties returning to the lines from which they had set out and not one of the maritime grievances that had ostensibly caused the fighting receiving so much as a mention in the text, for the sufficient reason that Napoleon's defeat had rendered them moot before the negotiators had finished seating themselves. Everything of consequence that the war accomplished, it accomplished off the map, and it accomplished two things.
The first is that Tecumseh was killed at the Battle of the Thames in October 1813 and his confederacy died with him, never to be reconstituted. At Ghent the British negotiators secured an article requiring the restoration of their Native allies to the position they had held in 1811, and having secured it on paper made no subsequent effort of any kind to enforce it, which is to say that the durable achievement of the War of 1812 was the destruction of organised Indigenous resistance east of the Mississippi and the abandonment by the British Empire of the peoples who had won it its most useful victories. That is the outcome, and it is not in the anthem.
The second is that the invasions manufactured, out of a scattered and quarrelsome collection of colonists who had not previously thought of themselves as anything in particular, the country they had been intended to absorb. Upper Canada emerged from the war with a founding story — a militia, a dead general in Isaac Brock, a farmer's wife in Laura Secord who walked twenty miles to warn of an American advance — and, more importantly, with an identity constructed in explicit opposition to the republic to the south. They had discovered that they were not merely British subjects living in an inconvenient climate. They were not-American, which is a far more adhesive proposition, and one that has never subsequently loosened.
1846: The Territory That Americans Have Forgotten
Say the word Oregon to an American and a state will come to mind, which is an obstacle to understanding what was actually being fought over, since the Oregon Country of the 1840s was a very much larger proposition: everything between the northern boundary of Mexican California at 42° north and the southern boundary of Russian Alaska at 54°40', comprising the present states of Oregon, Washington and Idaho, substantial portions of Montana and Wyoming, and the entirety of what is now British Columbia. Britain and the United States had occupied it jointly under an arrangement dating from 1818, which had functioned tolerably well for a quarter of a century on the sole condition that neither party want it very badly.
The received account is that Polk was elected in 1844 on the slogan Fifty-Four Forty or Fight, threatened war with the British Empire, and then compromised. Almost every element of this is wrong, and the correction is worth having, because what actually happened is both more interesting and more instructive about how brinkmanship is conducted by governments that have no intention of fighting.
The slogan does not appear until January 1846, more than a year after the election, manufactured largely by the Democratic press, and by the time it was circulating Polk had already privately offered the British precisely half of what it demanded. In July 1845, four months into his presidency, Secretary of State James Buchanan wrote to the British minister in Washington proposing the 49th parallel — the line that would eventually be adopted — although with a significant meanness attached, in that the offer withheld the navigation rights on the Columbia River which the Tyler administration had previously been willing to concede. Sir Richard Pakenham, finding the terms inferior to what had been on the table before him, rejected the proposal on his own authority, declined to furnish a counter-offer, and did not trouble to forward the American note to London at all. Aberdeen censured him for it, Peel observed that he ought certainly to have referred the matter home, and Aberdeen attempted immediately to reopen the conversation.
By then it was too late, not because either government wanted a war but because Polk had been publicly humiliated by a subordinate diplomat and was now the prisoner of his own position. He withdrew the offer on 30 August, declined Aberdeen's approaches, reasserted the entire claim in his annual message that December, and asked Congress to serve the required year's notice terminating the joint occupation, remarking privately that the only way to treat John Bull was to look him straight in the eye. Buchanan, who wanted an accommodation, and Polk, who wanted the British to fold, spent the winter arguing about it inside the cabinet.
What is generally omitted from the story is that Congress declined to supply the war. The demand for 54°40' came from a specific and limited faction — Cass of Michigan, Hannegan of Indiana, Allen of Ohio and the northwestern Democrats — and it was never remotely close to a majority. The Whigs wanted no war with Britain under any circumstances. The southern Democrats, whose leader Calhoun told the Senate in March 1846 that the 49th parallel was the only admissible line, wanted Texas and California and had no intention whatever of fighting the world's dominant navy for a rainy forest in which no cotton would grow. The notice that eventually passed in April was wrapped in language urging an amicable settlement, which is the parliamentary equivalent of a raised eyebrow.
Britain, for its part, had a famine in Ireland, an urgent requirement for American wheat, a Prime Minister whose government was being torn apart over the Corn Laws, and a Hudson's Bay Company that had already shifted its Pacific operations northward to Vancouver Island, so that the disputed territory's commercial value to the Empire was declining even as its rhetorical value to American politicians rose.
The war with Mexico supplied the exit that both governments had been looking for. Congress declared it on 13 May 1846; Pakenham's revised proposal, offering the 49th parallel with Vancouver Island retained and Columbia navigation preserved, arrived in early June; and Polk, with a manoeuvre of some cunning, submitted it to the Senate for its advice before signing, thereby arranging that the retreat should belong to somebody other than himself. The Senate obliged, the treaty was concluded on 15 June and ratified on the 18th by forty-one votes to fourteen, with every Whig in the chamber supporting a Democratic president and a substantial minority of his own party voting against him.
The men who had elected him understood exactly what had occurred. Allen resigned the chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee in protest. Hannegan denounced the settlement from the floor as a betrayal, and he was not wrong to describe it as one, since the North had been promised an empire reaching to the Alaskan panhandle and had received a survey line through a forest, while the South had been given a war of conquest with California at the end of it. Eight weeks after the treaty was ratified a previously obscure congressman from Pennsylvania named David Wilmot rose to propose that slavery be prohibited in any territory acquired from Mexico, and the sectional bargain that had made Polk president began to come apart along precisely the seam that his own asymmetrical bookkeeping had exposed.
The clean line that Americans see on a map and take for a fact of geography is the residue of all of this: a bluff called by a junior diplomat exceeding his instructions, sustained by a president who could not afford to be seen retreating, abandoned the moment a more attractive war became available, and drawn across the territory of nations who were never at any stage invited to comment.
1866–71: The Raids Conducted by Men Who Were Not the Government
The last of the four episodes is the strangest of them, and it is also the one that most closely resembles the manner in which conflict is actually prosecuted in the present century.
The Fenian Brotherhood was a private organisation of Irish-American veterans of the Civil War, men with recent combat experience, surplus weapons and a grievance of long standing, whose plan was to invade British North America, hold it hostage, and exchange it for the independence of Ireland. Between 1866 and 1871 they crossed the border repeatedly in organised formations, and at Ridgeway in June 1866 they defeated Canadian militia in an engagement that was, whatever else may be said about it, an actual battle fought on Canadian soil by an army raised in the United States.
The government of the United States authorised none of this, and neither did it prevent any of it. The Fenians recruited openly, raised funds openly and accumulated arms openly on American territory while Washington examined the ceiling with great interest, for the entirely instrumental reason that an armed Irish-American nuisance on Britain's northern frontier constituted useful leverage for so long as the two governments remained in dispute over British assistance to the Confederacy during the Civil War. When that dispute was settled by the Treaty of Washington in 1871, the Fenians ceased to be leverage, and the United States, having tolerated them for five years, suppressed them within months.
The raids produced one large and unintended consequence, which is that the fear of American irregulars operating with the connivance of a government that would not admit to conniving was among the more persuasive arguments deployed to drive the scattered British colonies into a single federation in 1867. The Fenians, in the most direct sense available, assisted in the invention of Canada.
II. The United States and Canada in the Present
Four attempts, four failures, and then a century and a half of quiet during which Americans concluded, understandably enough, that the quiet had always been there and constituted the natural condition of the continent.
The position as it stands this week is not quiet. The trade war opened in February 2025 with sweeping tariffs on Canadian goods and Canadian retaliation within days, and it has continued without meaningful interruption since. In February 2026 the Supreme Court struck down the tariffs that had been imposed under emergency powers, and replacements were signed under a different statutory authority within four days, which tells you something about the depth of the commitment. On 1 July 2026, at the mandatory six-year review of the continental trade agreement, the United States formally declined to extend it — an act that did not terminate the agreement but consigned it to annual renegotiation until 2036, thereby converting a settled framework into a permanent condition of uncertainty, which for an exporter is very nearly as damaging as abolition. Over the past weekend the administration imposed tariffs of fifty per cent on roughly twenty billion dollars of Canadian goods; Canada answered with dollar-for-dollar retaliation of up to fifty per cent scheduled to take effect on the eighth of September, and then quietly withdrew the portion covering seafood in order to limit the damage to its own industry.
Running alongside the tariffs for well over a year, and in the judgment of most Canadian observers mattering rather more than the tariffs, has been the open discussion of annexation: Canada as a fifty-first state, advanced sometimes as a joke and sometimes not, and on Thursday afternoon accompanied by the renaming of a lake.
The Canadian response has not been compliance, and it was never likely to be. It has consisted of a consumer boycott of American goods and travel now in its eighteenth month and showing no sign of exhaustion, a measurable and durable rise in anti-American sentiment, an urgent effort by the provinces to dismantle their own internal trade barriers so as to trade more with one another and less with the south, and a warming towards Beijing that would have been politically unimaginable three years ago and is now simply policy.
Whatever the pressure was designed to produce, what it has in fact produced is a country consolidating itself in opposition to the source of the pressure. This has happened before, on this precise border, for this precise reason, and rather recently by the standards of nations.
III. Russia and Ukraine
In February 2022 Russia invaded Ukraine on a plan calibrated in days rather than months, with administrators held in readiness for the rapid transfer of provincial government and, according to a good deal of subsequent reporting, dress uniforms packed for a parade in Kyiv. The operating assumption, which shaped the force structure, the axes of advance and the logistics alike, was that Russian-speaking eastern and southern Ukraine would receive the invasion with something between enthusiasm and indifference, on the grounds that the population spoke Russian, consumed Russian media and had historically inclined towards Moscow in its politics.
Russian-speaking Kharkiv, Mariupol and Odesa resisted more fiercely than anywhere else in the country.
For the eight years preceding, from 2014, Russia had conducted the war in the Donbas through deniable proxies: militias staffed substantially by veterans, supplied and armed across an international border, operating in a legal grey zone that permitted the sponsoring state to maintain that it was not present at all. Nobody of consequence believed the denial, and persuasion was never its function; its function was to hold the confrontation beneath the threshold at which the target's partners would be obliged to respond formally, and in that limited purpose it worked for the better part of a decade.
Underlying the whole of it was the justifying claim, advanced with increasing elaboration in the years before the invasion, that Ukraine constitutes an artificial division within a naturally unified sphere and that the larger nation therefore possesses a historical entitlement to it which no mere treaty can extinguish.
IV. The Machinery, Laid Side by Side
Set the episodes against one another and the mechanisms prove not merely similar but identical, which is the argument this essay exists to make.
The fallacy of the assumed welcome. In 1775 the Americans assumed that French Catholics would rise against Britain because they were French Catholics, and in 2022 Russia assumed that Russian-speakers would welcome Russia because they spoke Russian; in each case a demographic category was mistaken for a political loyalty, and in each case the invader failed to notice that the defending state had already spent years and considerable resources purchasing the allegiance of exactly that population — the Quebec Act in the first instance, Ukraine's own consolidation after 2014 in the second. It is worth adding that in both cases the invader's first instinct upon failing was to conclude that the message had been poorly delivered, which is why Congress sent Lafayette, and it is worth adding further that this instinct has never once been correct.
The presumption of easy conquest. Jefferson's mere matter of marching and the three days allotted to Kyiv are the same proposition expressed in different centuries: that a neighbour's cohesion must be brittle because it has not lately been tested. Both propositions were disproved in the same manner, which is that the testing of a nation's cohesion is very frequently the thing that creates it.
Coercion producing the opposite of compliance. The invasions of 1812 manufactured a Canadian national identity where none had existed, the Fenian raids helped to manufacture the Canadian state itself, and the tariff campaign of 2025 and 2026 is at present manufacturing something recognisably similar by wholly economic means. Pressure applied to a neighbour is nation-forming, and the nation that it forms is invariably theirs rather than yours.
The utility and the disposability of proxies. Seward's patience with the Fenians and Moscow's deniability in the Donbas rest on the same calculation, which is that violence one does not control is valuable precisely because one does not control it, and that the sponsor's tolerance will therefore last exactly as long as his bargaining position requires and not one week longer. The Fenians were suppressed in the season they ceased to be leverage, which suggests, incidentally, that such arrangements are ended by altering the sponsor's incentives rather than by appealing to his conscience.
Maximalism as domestic theatre. Polk demanded everything as far as Alaska while privately offering half of it, and settled for the half within weeks of acquiring a war he actually wanted. The lesson is emphatically not that commercial entanglement prevents conflict, since 1812 demonstrates commercial conflict producing a war; the lesson is that maximal claims are abandoned when the claimant's finite capacity is committed elsewhere, and that the abandonment is generally arranged so that somebody else appears to have authorised it.
V. Ignorance and Influence
We arrive at the part that actually matters, and for which everything preceding has been preparation.
Every Canadian schoolchild knows about the invasions. Brock and Secord and the burning of York occupy in the Canadian imagination approximately the position that Paul Revere occupies in the American, and the Fenian raids are taught as a founding pressure rather than as a curiosity. Scarcely any American has heard a word of any of it. Ask an American about Ridgeway and you will receive a blank and faintly embarrassed expression; ask a Canadian and you will receive the date, the outcome, and an opinion about the militia's performance.
This asymmetry is not a defect of curriculum that better textbooks might repair. It is structural, and it generalises without limit: the nation that acts has no need to remember what it did, whereas the nation acted upon cannot afford to forget, so that the memory of any event is distributed in inverse proportion to the power exercised over it. The strong forget because forgetting costs them nothing; the weak remember because remembering is the only form of accounting available to them.
Multiply that principle across the twentieth century and the actual dimensions of the thing become visible. There exists a very large number of countries in which some particular year is universal knowledge — a coup, an occupation, a base, a bombing, a programme of structural adjustment, an election that went a certain way for reasons everyone locally understands — concerning which every adult can tell you what the United States did, and of which no American has ever heard. Iran has 1953 and Guatemala has 1954 and Chile has 1973; the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Haiti, the Congo and Korea each possess their own, and so do a good many others that would lengthen this sentence beyond usefulness. These dates are not marginal grievances nursed by cranks. They are load-bearing components of national self-understanding, the things around which those countries organise their sense of what happened to them and why. Viewed from the American side they amount, when they amount to anything at all, to a paragraph in a survey course.
This is what is being reached for when hard power is distinguished from soft power, though the conventional framing has the relationship almost exactly inverted. The two are ordinarily presented as a menu of instruments, coercion set against attraction, the fleet against the film, with the implication that the second is the gentler and therefore the lesser. The more useful distinction lies not in the instrument but in the residue.
Hard power leaves behind a date. Somebody can name it, teach it, resent it, commemorate it and organise a politics around it; it generates a memory in the country upon which it lands, and that memory becomes a permanent component of that country's account of itself. Hard power is in this sense self-limiting, because it announces its own arrival and thereby supplies its victims with the materials for resistance.
Soft power leaves behind a default. It leaves not a date but a setting: the language in which serious business is conducted, the platform through which one scrolls in the evening, the format in which news is expected to arrive, the assumptions about what an ordinary prosperous life is supposed to contain, the grammar of cinema that appears natural only because one has never been exposed to a competing one. Soft power is by a wide margin the more thorough of the two precisely because it generates nothing whatever to remember; there is no anniversary of the year in which a country began to default to American assumptions, no monument to it, no date around which a grievance might be organised. It is invisible from within and total from without, and its subjects experience it not as influence but as the ordinary texture of modern life.
Consider, since the argument arrives here whether one wishes it to or not, the adolescent with a telephone. A child in Jakarta and a child in Ohio are moving through the same architecture — the same recommendation logic, the same aesthetic conventions, the same compressed emotional register, the same running quarrel over who ought to own the infrastructure — and yet the two experiences are not remotely equivalent, because for the first it is a foreign object encountered as culture and for the second it is water. Neither child is aware of the difference. The one who is unaware of it in the second manner is the one whose government has just renamed a lake and announced that nothing was meant by it.
The executive order of 27 August makes this point rather more economically than any argument I could construct. The aggression of the renaming is the lesser matter and will be the part that is discussed; the significant detail is the evident sincerity of no message. An act that will occupy Canadian newspapers for a year, that the Canadian Prime Minister answered personally within the hour, and that overwrites a Wendat word four centuries old, registers on the American side as scarcely an act at all — a stroke of a pen between other business, unaccompanied by any sense that something has been done to somebody. That distance, between the magnitude of a gesture where it is made and its magnitude where it lands, is the precise shape of American influence in the world: the reach is very nearly total and the awareness of the reach is very nearly absent, and it is the second fact rather than the first that ought to trouble anyone thinking seriously about power.
1958 Harvard Project: Goddamned Monarchs eh?
