with a sincere devotion
will accompany me as a source of unfailing gratification.

Happily, I shall carry with me from the public theater other sources,
which those who love their country most will best appreciate. I shall
behold it blessed with tranquillity and prosperity at home and with
peace and respect abroad. I can indulge the proud reflection that the
American people have reached in safety and success their fortieth year
as an independent nation; that for nearly an entire generation they have
had experience of their present Constitution, the offspring of their
undisturbed deliberations and of their free choice; that they have found
it to bear the trials of adverse as well as prosperous circumstances:
to contain in its combination of the federate and elective principles
a reconcilement of public strength with individual liberty, of national
power for the defense of national rights with a security against wars of
injustice, of ambition, and of vainglory in the fundamental provision
which subjects all questions of war to the will of the nation itself,
which is to pay its costs and feel its calamities. Nor is it less a
peculiar felicity of this Constitution, so dear to us all, that it is
found to be capable, without losing its vital energies, of expanding
itself over a spacious territory with the increase and expansion of the
community for whose benefit it was established.

And may I not be allowed to add to this gratifying spectacle that I
shall read in the character of the American people, in their devotion
to true liberty and to the Constitution which is its palladium, sure
presages that the destined career of my country will exhibit a
Government pursuing the public good as its sole object, and regulating
its means by the great principles consecrated in its charter and by
those moral principles to which they are so well allied; a Government
which watches over the purity of elections, the freedom of speech and
of the press, the trial by jury, and the equal interdict against
encroachments and compacts between religion and the state; which
maintains inviolably the maxims of public faith, the security of persons
and property, and encourages in every authorized mode that general
diffusion of knowledge which guarantees to public liberty its permanency
and to those who possess the blessing the true enjoyment of it; a
Government which avoids intrusions on the internal repose of other
nations, and repels them from its ow