Politics & Power Quote by Richard Parks Bland

The future Bland imagines is less a prediction than a piece of political engineering: build faith in the country’s destiny, and you build consent for the policies that claim to serve it. By anchoring his optimism in “many now born,” he recruits infants as rhetorical constituents. They can’t argue back, and that’s the point. The line turns long-term national ambition into a moral obligation owed to the next generation, a familiar move in American politics that makes present-day choices feel like stewardship rather than self-interest.

The sentence also does quiet work around power. “Genius nowhere equaled” isn’t simply praise; it’s a warrant for expansion, extraction, and global competition. Genius, in this framing, doesn’t float in the air - it “operate[s]” on “vast territory.” The land is cast as a stage set for American energies, not as contested space with existing claims, ecological limits, or costs. That omission is the subtext: an imperial confidence smuggled in as demographic inevitability.

Bland, a late-19th-century politician, spoke during a moment when the U.S. was industrializing at speed, arguing over monetary policy, and consolidating national markets while the frontier mythology still carried real political voltage. His language borrows the era’s boosterism - destiny as economics, patriotism as productivity. The result is a future-facing hymn that flatters the listener into agreement: if the nation is uniquely gifted and uniquely spacious, any program sold as unleashing that potential can present itself as common sense.