As the year ends

It's the traditional time to take a look back, but not just at 2008. This excellent article by Rich Lowry at National Review takes a long look back at our history. Read it and take comfort. Times might be tough right now, but we've seen terrible times before and managed to come through them alright. Here's a sample:

1837: In a real-estate bubble, people borrowed paper money to speculate in Western land. According to John Steele Gordon’s book An Empire of Wealth, land sales by the federal government were $2.5 million in 1832 and $25 million by 1836. President Andrew Jackson determined to prick the bubble by accepting only gold or silver as payment and succeeded all too well. Banks failed, Wall Street crashed, the price of cotton fell by half and 90 percent of the country’s factories closed. “The country suffered,” Gordon writes, “the longest economic depression in the nation’s history. It didn’t reach bottom until February 1843, fully seventy-two months after it began.”

I'm pretty sure we're going to go through some terrible times of our own, far worse than what we're experiencing right now. I pray we'll come out on the far side as we have in the past: free, united, strong, prosperous.

God bless this country.