Thank you very much. I hope you can hear me okay. There are going to be a few numbers in this, but not too many. I'll just give you one number to start with, which is that I've been asked to talk for an hour. I feel I should warn you about that. And I will stop after an hour, I promise, and maybe slightly before. I want to start with what may be a statement of the obvious.

American democracy is an amazing thing.

It's amazing, it's fascinating, it's bewildering.

It's always struck people as amazing.

There's never been anything quite like it, even in the world we live in now,

where democracy is a far more widespread phenomenon than it used to be. There's nothing quite like it, even in the world we live in now, where democracy is a far more widespread

phenomenon than it used to be, there's nothing quite like American democracy.

I think to start with, at the beginning of the American Republic, what people found most amazing

about it was just its sheer implausibility. The idea that you could actually do politics

like this with this kind of relentless,

chaotic, popular input. And it was also implausible at the beginning, particularly in British

eyes, because it was so obviously bogus and fraudulent because of slavery. Slavery made

a mockery of the ideals of American democracy. And outsiders could see that very clearly, insiders not always.

Then in the second half of the 19th century,

I think what really fascinated people about American democracy

was its incredible capacity for violence.

The civil war was this truly cataclysmic event.

And Europe, which had seen its fair share of wars over the years,

had never seen anything like that, that kind of industrial slaughter,

until the first World War, which was in many ways Europe's civil war,

until the Americans joined in in 1917, at which point it became a world war,

and that then initiated the next phase of fascination with American democracy,

...