2020: America was not built without some "bumps in the road."

WARREN BUFFETT: But it was not done — and this is important — because we’ve now hit a bump in the road — it was not done without some very, very serious bumps in the road. It was not 231 years of steady progress. And matter of fact, we had been in the — in this birth of this country — we had been, what, into it 72 years — and if we go to the next slide —

In 1861, we now had about 31 million people — the 1960 [1860] census showed around 31 million people or thereabouts — in the country, and 4 million of them were slaves and we had never really resolved the very much unfinished business of what was involved in compromises in 1789, and we’ll have more to say about that later.

But we had something that not too many countries experienced — and if you’d told people in 1789, that in 17 — in 72 years, you were going to have a division that caused the president of the United States, at Gettysburg, to say that “testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and dedicated can long endure.”

Imagine the president of the United States wondering aloud whether the country that he was presiding over could long endure only 72 years — or 74 years at Gettysburg — had taken place.

So, while this marvelous dream was being played out, roughly a third of the way through it, we face this — this really moment of decision.

And we entered into a contest that — if we’ll go to the next slide — I made an estimate — that literally killed roughly 6 percent of the males in the country who were between 18 and 60 —I’m assuming that there were more than 600,000 deaths in the war.

I think it’s a reasonable estimate that — that — that 18 to 60 group of males were, by far, the great proportion.

So, imagine 6 percent of your working prime-age males in a country are wiped out in four years.

So, when we look at the progress of this country, and we think of our own problems — and now I just ask you to ponder — we’ll move to the next slide — that would be equivalent today to having 4 billion males in that same age group similarly wiped out.

So that was one incredible interruption, which this country nevertheless worked through, while compiling this American dream that is one of the wonders of the world, perhaps the wonder of the world in many senses.