two or even half a
dozen generations; for we cannot coerce the laws of nature, although it
is quite certain, from what we have done, that we can perform anything
within the range of possible achievement.

We have all the elements within and around us necessary to constitute a
great people. We started on our career with a long background of
experience to guide and to warn us. We saw what Europe had done for
civilization with her long roll of kings and priests, her despotic
governments, and her unequal laws--the people in most cases ciphers, and
in all cases ignorant and enslaved--with no room for expansion, and
little or no hope of political or social betterment; every inch of
liberty, in every direction, which they had gained, wrung from their
oppressors piecemeal, in bloody throes of agony.

Our fathers had not the best materials out of which to build up a
republic; neither, in all cases, were they themselves sufficiently ripe
for the experiment. They had the old leaven of European prejudice
largely intermingled in their minds and character. They could not help,
it is true, their original make, nor the fashioning which their age,
time, and circumstances had put upon them. All this has to be taken into
the estimate of any philosophical judgment respecting their
performances. But they had learned from the past to trust the present,
and to span the future with rainbows of hope. They stood face to face
with the people, and each looked into the others' eyes and read there
the grounds and sureties of an immortal triumph. Instead, therefore, of
resting the supreme power of government in the hands of a person, or a
class, making the former a monarch, and creating the other an
aristocracy, those grand magistrates and senators of human liberty who
framed the Constitution of the new American Nation, made the nation its
own sovereign, and clothed it with the authority and majesty of
self-government.

A venture so daring, and of an audacity so Titanic and sublime, seemed
at that time and long afterward to require the wisdom and omnipotence of
gods to guide it over the breakers, and steer it into the calm waters of
intelligent government. All the world, except the handful of thinkers
and enthusiasts scattered here and there over Europe, was against it,
mocked at its bravery and aspirations, and sincerely hoped and believed
that some great and sudden calamity would dissolve it like a baleful
enchantment. But the hope of the republ