Still the Same After 201 Years


In an 1806 letter Benjamin Latrobe writes:

The want of learning and of science in the majority is one of those things which strikes foreigners who visit us very forceably.1

I don’t know if today’s visiting foreigners have the learning and science to make such an evaluation but if they did they would say the same.

1quoted by Gordon Wood in The Radicalism of the American Revolution, 1991, 295