ce that
period, a population of four millions has multiplied to twelve. A
territory bounded by the Mississippi has been extended from sea to sea.
New States have been admitted to the Union, in numbers nearly equal to
those of the first confederation. Treaties of pence, amity, and commerce,
have been concluded with the principal dominions of the earth. The people
of other nations, inhabitants of regions acquired, not by conquests, but
by compact, have been united with us in the participation of our rights
and duties, of our burdens and blessings. The forest has fallen by the axe
of our woodsmen--the soil has been made to teem by the tillage of our
farmers; our commerce has whitened every ocean. The dominion of man over
physical nature has been extended by the invention of our artists. Liberty
and law have marched hand in hand. All the purposes of human association
have been accomplished as effectually as under any other Government on
the globe, and at a cost little exceeding, in a whole generation, the
expenditures of other nations in a single year.

"Such is the unexaggerated picture of our condition under a constitution
founded upon the republican principle of equal rights. To admit that this
picture has its shades, is but to say, that it is still the condition of
men upon earth. From evil--physical, moral, and political--it is not our
claim to be exempt. We have suffered, sometimes by the visitation of
Heaven through disease, often by the wrongs and injustice of other
nations, even to the extremities of war; and lastly, by dissentions among
ourselves--dissentions, perhaps, inseparable from the enjoyment of
freedom, but which have more than once appeared to threaten the
dissolution of the Union, and, with it, the overthrow of all the
enjoyments of our present lot, and all our earthly hopes of the future.
The causes of these dissensions have been various, founded upon
differences of speculation in the theory of republican government, upon
conflicting views of policy in our relations with foreign nations; upon
jealousies of partial and sectional interests, aggravated by prejudices
and prepossessions, which strangers to each other are ever apt to
entertain.

"It is a source of gratification and of encouragement to me, to observe
that the great result of this experiment upon the theory of human rights,
has, at the close of that generation by which it was formed, been crowned
with success equal to the most sanguine expecta