hich we can
express a more deep and earnest conviction, than of the inestimable
importance of that religion to man, both in regard to this life and that
which is to come.

If the blessings of our political and social condition have not been too
highly estimated, we cannot well overrate the responsibility and duty
which they impose upon us. We hold these institutions of government,
religion, and learning, to be transmitted, as well as enjoyed. We are in
the line of conveyance, through which whatever has been obtained by the
spirit and efforts of our ancestors is to be communicated to our
children.

We are bound to maintain public liberty, and, by the example of our own
systems, to convince the world that order and law, religion and
morality, the rights of conscience, the rights of persons, and the
rights of property, may all be preserved and secured, in the most
perfect manner, by a government entirely and purely elective. If we fail
in this, our disaster will be signal, and will furnish an argument,
stronger than has yet been found, in support of those opinions which
maintain that government can rest safely on nothing but power and
coercion. As far as experience may show errors in our establishments, we
are bound to correct them; and if any practices exist contrary to the
principles of justice and humanity within the reach of our laws or our
influence, we are inexcusable if we do not exert ourselves to restrain
and abolish them.

I deem it my duty on this occasion to suggest, that the land is not yet
wholly free from the contamination of a traffic, at which every feeling
of humanity must for ever revolt,--I mean the African slave-trade.[18]
Neither public sentiment, nor the law, has hitherto been able entirely
to put an end to this odious and abominable trade. At the moment when
God in his mercy has blessed the Christian world with a universal peace,
there is reason to fear, that, to the disgrace of the Christian name and
character, new efforts are making for the extension of this trade by
subjects and citizens of Christian states, in whose hearts there dwell
no sentiments of humanity or of justice, and over whom neither the fear
of God nor the fear of man exercises a control. In the sight of our law,
the African slave-trader is a pirate and a felon; and in the sight of
Heaven, an offender far beyond the ordinary depth of human guilt. There
is no brighter page of our history, than that which records the measures
whi