The priceless copy of Magna Carta on display in the British pavilion was supposed to go home when the fair closed on October 1. After high-level disc… - Arthur Herman

It became a commonplace to say, as we do today, that a market economy depends on people pursuing their own self-interest. But self-interest to a student of civil society such as Adam Smith did not mean avarice or greed. Those were the typical antisocial attitudes of a more primitive state of economy and society, in which the fear of material scarcity is genuine and real. Instead, self-interest in a civilized or “polite” society involves the rational desire to provide goods and services at a profit to an equally self-interested consumer

When, two years later, the Paris Peace Conference wrapped itself around the principle of self-determination, it was automatically assumed that the principle posed no threat to the existing colonial empires of the victorious powers — the United States included.

now, there was a democratic government in Berlin willing to renounce all its conquests east and west, and to relinquish huge stockpiles of arms, making a renewal of war all but impossible.