Crises Of Nations

"How sleep the brave who sink to rest,
By all their country's wishes blest."

       "There are brief crises in which the drift of individual and national history is determined, sometimes unexpectedly; critical moments on which great decisions hang; days which, like a mountain in a plain, lift themselves above the dead level of common days into everlasting eminence. Our Day of Independence was such a day; so was the day of Marathon, and the day of Waterloo. Napoleon admitted that the Austrians fought grandly on the field of Rivoli, and said, They failed because they do not understand the value of minutes" Humboldt refers the discovery of America to a wonderful concatenation of trivial circumstances," including a flight of parrots." Dr. Foss