principle. We are all
Republicans; we are all Federalists. If there be any among us who wish
to dissolve this Union, or to change its republican form, let them stand
undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may
be tolerated, where reason is left free to combat it. I know, indeed,
that some honest men fear that a republican government cannot be strong;
that this government is not strong enough. But would the honest patriot,
in the full tide of successful experiment, abandon a government which
has so far kept us free and firm, on the theoretic and visionary fear,
that this government, the world's best hope, may, by possibility, want
energy to preserve itself? I trust not. I believe this, on the contrary,
the strongest government on earth. I believe it the only one where every
man, at the call of the law, would fly to the standard of the law, and
would meet invasions of the public order as his own personal concern.
Sometimes it is said, that man cannot be trusted with the government of
himself. Can he then be trusted with the government of others? Or, have
we found angels in the form of kings, to govern him? Let history answer
this question.

Let us then, with courage and confidence, pursue our own federal and
republican principles; our attachment to union and representative
government. Kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the
exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe; too high-minded to
endure the degradation of the others, possessing a chosen country, with
room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth
generation, entertaining a due sense of our equal right to the use of
our own faculties, to the acquisition of our own industry, to honor and
confidence from our fellow-citizens, resulting not from birth, but from
our actions and their sense of them, enlightened by a benign religion,
professed indeed and practised in various forms, yet all of them
inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man,
acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence, which, by all its
dispensations, proves that it delights in the happiness of man here, and
his greater happiness hereafter; with all these blessings, what more is
necessary to make us a happy and prosperous people? Still one thing
more, fellow-citizens, a wise and frugal government, which shall
restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free
to regulate their own pursuits o