Consider these lines: "Americans should realize that it was easier to control one person than it was to control many. Furthermore, one person could also act with an energy that Congress did not possess. Making decisions alone, the president could decide what actions should be taken faster than could Congress, whose deliberations, because of its size, were necessarily slow." As used in the quoted lines, "energy" most nearly means:

1. The sentence after the word explains it: deciding alone, the president acts faster than a slow, large Congress. 2. So the energy Congress lacks is the capacity for quick, decisive action. 3. Option A, speed and decisiveness, matches that explanation. 4. Options B, C, and D each take a physical or emotional sense of energy that the surrounding sentences never support. _Source: OpenStax American Government 3e (CC BY 4.0), Ch 2 "The Constitution and Its Origins", section 2.4 The Ratification of the Constitution_