Alberta is poised to hold a referendum on seceding from Canada later this year, and supporters of independence credit Trump’s disruptive energy for adding fuel to their movement.

—Wall Street Journal, February 2026.

Consider this: if you would ever try To take an oblong tray that’s full of water Clear across a room, you would surely Spill a lot of it before you’re done. But if you put dividers in the tray, It is simplicity itself to move Without a single droplet being spilled.

And so with much of life, division solves The problems and improves the end results. Books are best divided into chapters, Homes improve divided into rooms, Battleships are made more difficult To sink by being separated into Insulated cubicles, and even Finches in Galapagos survived When over ages they divided into Fourteen different species, each one with Its separate niche of food and cover, finding They would all die off if they remained A single species after a single prey.

And so it is with forms of government: The city-states of Greece, the villages And towns of Europe in medieval times, The townships of New England in its early Days, in religious settlements of sects— In all of these the peace was kept and feuds And such allayed, not by fights and wars, And not by forced adherence to a single Tenet or belief, but by division: Fission, separation, segmentation, Parting, resettlement, secession, and Divorce.

In Dinka villages when feuds Broke out between one family and another, Daily life would suffer and one of them Would be encouraged to go resettle elsewhere Down the valley, the parting maybe lightened With a parting gift, a cow or two.

In eighteenth- Century New England fission was So common it became the greatest part Of business with the government in Boston, Since by law you had to get the state’s Permission to establish separate towns. One typical petition from the town Of Dunstable explained, “We are but small, But we believe a small society Well unified may more easily Go through such business as the building of A meeting house and choosing a minister Than a greater number when there’s nothing but Discord and disaffection.”

In Switzerland, A place where regions have divided up For seven centuries, the guiding precept Has always been to satisfy the wishes Of minorities by territory Rather than go through the endless rounds Of a territory’s “rights.” Let’s take canton Appenzell as one example there. While nations all around were fighting their Imbrued religious wars in the aftermath Of Europe’s Reformation, Catholics versus Protestants, it just divided up: The Lutheran minority chose To make itself the new community Of Ausser Rhoden, while the Catholics Stayed behind as what became the Inner Rhoden, and thus they lived in peace the next Five hundred years.

So thus we come to one inevitable decision. To solve the problems of this weary world: division.

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