know what
position America will take in the approaching crisis of the world.

There are moments in the national life of a people, when to adopt a
certain course becomes a natural necessity: and in such moments the
people always gets instinctively conscious of the necessity, and answers
it by adopting a direction spontaneously. That direction is decisive. It
must be followed: and it is followed. Pre-eminent patriots, joining in
the people's instinct, may become either the interpreters or the
executors of it; but they can neither impart their own direction to the
people, nor alter that which public opinion has fixed. There are no
other means to become a great man and a great patriot but by becoming
the impersonification of the public sentiment, conscious of a surpassing
public necessity. Those who would endeavour to measure great things by
a small individual scale, would always fall short in their calculations,
and be left behind.

There have been already several such moments in your country's brief but
glorious history. I will only mention your glorious Revolution of 1775.
Who made that Revolution? The People; the unarmed heroes; the Public
Opinion. If the question had been left to the decision of some few,
though the best and the wisest of all, _they never would have advised
a struggle_; but would have arranged matters diplomatically. You
remember what anxious endeavours were made to prove that it was not the
Americans who fired the first shot, and how exculpations were sent to
England with protestations of allegiance. All those little steps were
vain. The people felt that it was time to become an independent nation;
and feeling the necessity of the moment, it took a direction by itself,
and made the Revolution by itself.

Now-a-days it is of an equally pregnant necessity to the United States,
to take the position of a power on earth. Nobody can hereafter make the
people believe that it is possible for America to remain unaffected by
the condition of the Old World,--to advise that the United States shall
still abstain from mixing up their concerns with those of Europe. The
question to be decided is not whether America shall mix its concerns
with those of the Old World; because that is done. But the question is,
whether the United States shall take a seat in the great Amphictyonic
Council of the nations or not? And whether it shall be permitted to some
crowned mortals to substitute the whims of their ambition in the