irty-one stars of Sovereign States into one mighty
constellation of Freedom, Power, and Right; where the Congress and
Government of this vast Republic watch over the common weal of your
united country, and hereby make you a Power on earth, a fullgrown member
of that great Family of Nations, which, having One Father in heaven, are
brethren, and should act as brethren.

Among the interests intrusted by you to the Congress and Government,
your _foreign policy_ is nearly the most important. This, in a
great and powerful nation, can have no other basis than Eternal Law and
Christian Morality. Even your peculiar interests are, in my belief, best
served, when your foreign policy rests, not on transitory
considerations, but on everlasting principles. Even in private life no
man can entirely cut himself off from others. A man willing to attempt
it would be an exile in his own country, an exile in his own city, an
exile in his family. Just so with nations, which in the larger family of
man are individual members. If a nation seclude itself, it is an exile
in the midst of humanity. No man, ladies and gentlemen, is independent
of his fellow-man; no nation, however powerful, is independent of other
nations. Put the richest, the strongest man for a single week wholly
apart from family, city, country, and he will quickly learn his
essential weakness. In a nation, the consequence of total isolation is
not felt as soon, but it will at length be felt as surely. The
_hours_ of nations are counted by _years_; yet the secluded
nation, self-exiled from mankind, dwindles away. Woe to the people,
whose citizens care only for their own present, and not for the future
of their country! the future, in which they have to live immortally by
children and children's children, with whose glory and happiness and
power they ought now to sympathize. Men or nations secluded are like
the silk-worm, which secretes itself in a self-woven case, and at length
creeps out to die. So will it at length be with the nation which is
wrapped up in self.

It is one of your glories, that some portions of your united republic
are farther from other portions than Hungary is from Baltimore: mere
distance is therefore no reason why you should be unconcerned about our
fate. You are not too far for commercial intercourse with the most
distant coasts of Europe; and especially since the invention of one of
your citizens has been brought to higher perfection, the ocean rather