contests, should they occur, and to
whatever extent they may be carried, we shall be neutral; but as a
neutral power we have rights which it is our duty to maintain. For like
injuries it will be incumbent on us to seek redress in a spirit of
amity, in full confidence that, injuring none, none would knowingly
injure us. For more imminent dangers we should be prepared, and it
should always be recollected that such preparation adapted to the
circumstances and sanctioned by the judgment and wishes of our
constituents can not fail to have a good effect in averting dangers of
every kind. We should recollect also that the season of peace is best
adapted to these preparations.

If we turn our attention, fellow-citizens, more immediately to the
internal concerns of our country, and more especially to those on which
its future welfare depends, we have every reason to anticipate the
happiest results. It is now rather more than forty-four years since we
declared our independence, and thirty-seven since it was acknowledged.
The talents and virtues which were displayed in that great struggle were
a sure presage of all that has since followed. A people who were able to
surmount in their infant state such great perils would be more competent
as they rose into manhood to repel any which they might meet in their
progress. Their physical strength would be more adequate to foreign
danger, and the practice of self-government, aided by the light of
experience, could not fail to produce an effect equally salutary on all
those questions connected with the internal organization. These
favorable anticipations have been realized.

In our whole system, national and State, we have shunned all the defects
which unceasingly preyed on the vitals and destroyed the ancient
Republics. In them there were distinct orders, a nobility and a people,
or the people governed in one assembly. Thus, in the one instance there
was a perpetual conflict between the orders in society for the
ascendency, in which the victory of either terminated in the overthrow
of the government and the ruin of the state; in the other, in which the
people governed in a body, and whose dominions seldom exceeded the
dimensions of a county in one of our States, a tumultuous and disorderly
movement permitted only a transitory existence. In this great nation
there is but one order, that of the people, whose power, by a peculiarly
happy improvement of the representative principle, is trans