I know, indeed, that some honest men have feared that a republican
government cannot be strong; that this government is not strong enough.
But would not the honest patriot, in the full tide of successful
experiment, abandon a government which has so far kept us free and firm
on the theoretic and visionary fear that this government, the world's
best hope, may by possibility want energy to preserve itself? I trust
not. I believe this, on the contrary, the strongest government on earth.
I believe it is the only one where every man, at the call of the law,
would fly to the standard of the law; would meet invasions of public
order as his own personal concern.
Sometimes, it is said, that man cannot be trusted with the government of
himself. Can he then be trusted with the government of others? Or have
we found angels in the form of kings to govern him? Let history answer
this question. Let us, then, pursue with courage and confidence our
own federal and republican principle, our attachment to union and
representative government.
Kindly separated by nature, and a wide ocean, from the exterminating
havoc of one quarter of the globe, too high-minded to endure the
degradation of the others; possessing a chosen country with room enough
for all to the hundredth and thousandth generation; entertaining a
dull sense of our equal right to the use of our own faculties, to
the acquisition of our own industry, to honor and confidence from our
fellow-citizens, resulting not from birth, but from our actions and
their sense of them, enlightened by a benign religion, professed,
indeed, and practiced in various forms, yet all of them inculcating
honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude and the love of man, acknowledging
and adoring an overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations
proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and in his greater
happiness hereafter.
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