ecognized the unequaled services of the first
President, it was a common sentiment that the great weight of his
character could alone bind the discordant materials of our Government
together and save us from the violence of contending factions. Since
his death nearly forty years are gone. Party exasperation has been often
carried to its highest point; the virtue and fortitude of the people
have sometimes been greatly tried; yet our system, purified and enhanced
in value by all it has encountered, still preserves its spirit of free
and fearless discussion, blended with unimpaired fraternal feeling.

The capacity of the people for self-government, and their willingness,
from a high sense of duty and without those exhibitions of coercive
power so generally employed in other countries, to submit to all needful
restraints and exactions of municipal law, have also been favorably
exemplified in the history of the American States. Occasionally, it is
true, the ardor of public sentiment, outrunning the regular progress
of the judicial tribunals or seeking to reach cases not denounced
as criminal by the existing law, has displayed itself in a manner
calculated to give pain to the friends of free government and to
encourage the hopes of those who wish for its overthrow. These
occurrences, however, have been far less frequent in our country than
in any other of equal population on the globe, and with the diffusion of
intelligence it may well be hoped that they will constantly diminish in
frequency and violence. The generous patriotism and sound common sense
of the great mass of our fellow-citizens will assuredly in time produce
this result; for as every assumption of illegal power not only wounds
the majesty of the law, but furnishes a pretext for abridging the
liberties of the people, the latter have the most direct and permanent
interest in preserving the landmarks of social order and maintaining
on all occasions the inviolability of those constitutional and legal
provisions which they themselves have made.

In a supposed unfitness of our institutions for those hostile
emergencies which no country can always avoid their friends found a
fruitful source of apprehension, their enemies of hope. While they
foresaw less promptness of action than in governments differently
formed, they overlooked the far more important consideration that with
us war could never be the result of individual or irresponsible will,
but must be a measure of