wonderful that the agitation
of the billows should reach even this distant and peaceful shore; that
this should be more felt and feared by some and less by others, and
should divide opinions as to measures of safety. But every difference of
opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different
names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all
Federalists. If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this
Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as
monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated
where reason is left free to combat it. I know, indeed, that some honest
men fear that a republican government can not be strong, that this
Government is not strong enough; but would 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 the only one where every
man, at the call of the law, would fly to the standard of the law, and
would meet invasions of the public order as his own personal concern.
Sometimes it is said that man can not be trusted with the government of
himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have
we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer
this question.

Let us, then, with courage and confidence pursue our own Federal and
Republican principles, 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 degradations of the others; possessing a chosen country, with
room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth
generation; entertaining a due sense of our equal right to the use of
our own faculties, to the acquisitions 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