Quote of the Day (Washington Irving, With a Colonial New Yorker Anticipating the Presidential Executive Order)

“No sooner had this bustling little man [Governor Wilhelmus Kieft, or “William the Testy”] been blown by a whiff of fortune into the seat of government, than he called together his council, and delivered a very animated speech on the affairs of the province…. [E]verybody knows what a glorious opportunity a governor, a president, or even an emperor has of drubbing his enemies in his speeches, messages, and bulletins, where he has the talk all on his own side…[H]e at length came to the less important part of his speech, the situation of the province; and here he soon worked himself into a fearful rage against the Yankees, whom he compared to the Gauls who desolated Rome, and the Goths and Vandals who overran the fairest plains of Europe—nor did he forget to mention, in terms of adequate opprobrium, the insolence with which they had encroached upon the territories of New Netherlands, and the unparalleled audacity with which they had commenced the town of New-Plymouth, and planted the onion patches of Weathersfield under the very walls of Fort Good Hope. Having thus artfully wrought up his tale of terror to a climax, he assumed a self-satisfied look, and declared, with a nod of knowing import, that he had taken measures to put a final stop to these encroachments—that he had been obliged to have recourse to a dreadful engine of warfare, lately invented, awful in its effects, but authorized by direful necessity. In a word, he was resolved to conquer the Yankees—by proclamation.”— American fiction writer, biographer and diplomat Washington Irving (1783-1859), A Knickerbocker's History of New York (1809)