he talents, the capacities, the virtues of the citizens
of whom it is composed? To utilize those talents, to evoke those
capacities, to offer scope and opportunity to those virtues, must be
the end and purpose of every great and generous policy; and to that
end, up to the measure of my powers, I have striven to minister, not
rashly, I hope, nor with impatience, but in the spirit of a sober and
assured faith.

"Such is my conception of liberalism. But if liberalism has its
mission at home, not less important are its principles in the region of
international relations. I will not now embark on the troubled sea of
foreign policy. But on one point I will touch, since it was raised by
the last speaker, and that is the question of our foreign trade. In no
department of human activity, I will venture to say, are the intentions
of the Almighty more plainly indicated, than in this of the interchange
of the products of labour. To each part of the habitable globe have
been assigned its special gifts for the use and delectation of Man; to
every nation its peculiar skill, its appropriate opportunities. As the
world was created for labour, so it was created for exchange. Across
the ocean, bridged at last by the indomitable pertinacity of art, the
granaries of the new world call, in their inexhaustible fecundity for
the iron and steel, the implements and engines of the old. The
shepherd-kings of the limitless plains of Australia, the Indian ryot,
the now happily emancipated negro of Georgia and Carolina, feed and are
fed by the factories and looms of Manchester and Bradford. Pall Mall
is made glad with the produce of the vineyards of France and Spain; and
the Italian peasant goes clad in the labours of the Leicester artisan.
The golden chain revolves, the silver buckets rise and fall; and one to
the other passes on, as it fills and overflows, the stream that pours
from Nature's cornucopia! Such is the law ordained by the Power that
presides over the destinies of the world; and not all the interferences
of man with His beneficent purposes can avail altogether to check and
frustrate their happy operation. Yet have the blind cupidity, the
ignorant apprehensions of national zeal dislocated, so far as was
possible, the wheels and cogs of the great machine, hampered its
working and limited its uses. And if there be anything of which this
great nation may justly boast, it is that she has been the first to
tear down the barriers