Happy Thanksgiving!

The greatest American holiday reflects our national spirit of enterprise, and extraordinary vision and courage of our forefathers.

Jennie A. Brownscombe, 1914.

There were many motives for the English who came across the ocean to the New World, from the noble to the venal, and there is no doubt that the incumbent natives and imported slaves paid an awful price. As conquests in human history go, however, the long-term consequences of the Anglo-Irish invasion were extraordinarily good. The arrival of the English, the Scots, the Scots-Irish, and ultimately the Irish and other waves of immigrants created in the United States and Canada a vast refuge from tyranny and the world's greatest engine for material prosperity. Literally billions of people lived freer and ate well as a result, and still do. If original sin can be expiated through great accomplishment, Americans and Canadians have done so.