On this day in 1776 US congress proclaimed the Declaration of Independence from Britain. There is not much more about this event that hasn't already been said. Post-Columbian America only has five hundred odd years of history. However, it doesn't seem to worry Americans. Whatever sense of national identity they lack compared to say, Egypt (at least five thousand years of history) they make up for in energy and imagination. It must have taken courage on that day to defy one of the then greatest countries in the world by signing the Declaration. As Benjamin Franklin said to his fifty-five co-signatories: "we must all hang together or assuredly we will all hang separately." Today's poem is by Englishman George Crabbe who lived at the time of the War of Independence, Late Wisdom:

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