A paper by Sir Francis Galton first published in the March 7, 1907 issue of the scientific journal, NATURE. The paper provides what appears to be the first solid explanation for why Google’s ranking algorithm, not to mention the form of government we've come to know as “democracy”, are so capable.
An online edition of the Federalist Papers which is pleasant to look at and provides paragraph-level permalinking. Each paper is marked up in the hAtom microformat with an elastic layout (stays beautiful with bigger/smaller font size).