something I found a long time ago. I still read it and try to be hopeful. I do so love my country.

In 1778, the French statesman Turgot wrote:
This people is the hope of the human race. It may become the model. It ought
to show the world by facts that men can be free and yet peaceful, and may
dispense with the chains in which tyrants and knaves of every color have
presumed to bind them, under pretext of the public good. The Americans should be
an example of political, religious, commercial and industrial liberty. The
asylum they offer to the oppressed of every nation, the avenue of escape they
open, will compel governments to be just and enlightened; and the rest of the
world in due time will see through the empty illusions in which policy is
conceived. But to obtain these ends for us, America must secure them to herself;
and must not become, as so many of your ministerial writers have predicted, a
mass of divided powers, contending for territory and trade, cementing the
slavery of peoples by their own blood.
Had Turgot lived long enough, he
would have marveled at both the successes and the failures of the American
people. Yet both the failures and the successes are part of the democratic
story, a story told by these readings.

This was found courtesy of the following: http://211.72.249.29/docs/democracy/demo.htm