My first idea was to write a tract a few pages long, but I was carried away by my subject, and before I knew what I was doing my tract had become a kind of book, too large indeed for the matter contained in it, but too small for the subject of which it treats. For a long time I hesitated whether to publish it or not, and I have often felt, when at work upon it, that it is one thing to publish a few pamphlets and another to write a book. After vain attempts to improve it, I have decided that it is my duty to publish it as it stands. I consider that public attention requires to be directed to this subject, and even if my own ideas are mistaken, my time will not have been wasted if I stir up others to form right ideas. A solitary who casts his writings before the public without any one to advertise them, without any party ready to defend them, one who does not even know what is thought and said about those writings, is at least free from one anxiety—if he is mistaken, no one will take his errors for gospel. –Rousseau

I am trusting you to not take my errors for gospel.

I think I had intended to give a name to a genre within belles lettres, but I didn’t make it that far down the path. I do still mean to declare less and manifest more, even though that’s a declaration. The -fest half of the word is problematic to the ear ennit.

Anyway to go around.

The other militantly Murican thing about manifest is that destiny thing. Destiny is ‘the irresistible tendency of certain events’ to happen. Events like the consolidation of federal power all the way to the Pacific shore. Translated, manifest destiny means that this event was obviously the will of some god. I don’t have to declare the ridiculousness of that.