Graham C. Parks is named the winner of the Second OICR Prize for the Redemption of the Most Illustrious Lost, Discarded, or Forgotten Work for Making Sense of Present-Day American Crises & Dilemmas.
His selection: Count Agénor de Gasparin's The Uprising of a Great People: The United States in 1861 (Mary L. Booth, trans.)
"And it was thus far, to this degree of disorder and abasement, that a noble people had been dragged downwards in the course of years, sinking constantly deeper, abandoning, one by one, its guarantees, losing its titles to the esteem of other nations, approaching the abyss, seeing the hour draw nigh in which to rise would be impossible, bringing down maledictions upon itself, forcing those who love it to reflect on the words of one of its most illustrious leaders: ‘I tremble for my country, whenever I remember that God is just!’
All this under the tyrannical and pitiless influence of a minority constantly transformed into a majority! Picture to yourself a man on a vessel standing by the gun-room with a lighted match in his hand; he is alone, but the rest obey him, for at the first disobedience he will blow up himself with all the crew. This is precisely what has been going on in America since she went adrift. The working of the ship was commanded by the man who held the match."
—Count Agénor de Gasparin, The Uprising of a Great People: The United States in 1861, pp. 28-29
n.b. The full text can be accessed below. Click on the right-hand corner to advance; the left-hand corner, to go backwards.