ular
elections. That the General Government of the Union, and the separate
Governments of the States, are all sovereignties of legitimate powers;
fellow servants of the same masters, uncontrolled within their respective
spheres--uncontrollable by encroachments on each other. If there have been
those who doubted whether a confederated representative democracy was a
government competent to the wise and orderly management of the common
concerns of a mighty nation, those doubts have been dispelled. If there
have been projects of partial confederacies to be erected upon the ruins
of the Union, they have been scattered to the winds. If there have been
dangerous attachments to one foreign nation, and antipathies against
another, they have been extinguished. Ten years of peace at home and
abroad have assuaged the animosities of political contention and blended
into harmony the most discordant elements of public opinion. There still
remains one effort of magnanimity, one sacrifice of prejudice and passion,
to be made by the individuals throughout the nation who have heretofore
followed the standards of political party. It is that of discarding every
remnant of rancor against each other, of embracing, as countrymen and
friends, and of yielding to talents and virtue alone that confidence
which, in times of contention for principle, was bestowed only upon those
who bore the badge of party communion.

During the administration of John Quincy Adams, he was really the Chief
Magistrate. He submitted neither his reason nor his conscience to the
control of any partisan cabal. No man was appointed to office in obedience
to political dictation, and no faithful public servant was proscribed. The
result rewarded his magnanimity. Faction ceased to exist. When South
Carolina, a few years afterward, assumed the very ground that the ancient
republican party had indicated as lawful and constitutional, and claimed
the right and power to set aside, within her own limits, acts of Congress
which she pronounced void, because they transcended the Federal authority,
she called on the republican party throughout the Union in vain. The
dangerous heresy had been renounced forever. Since that time there has
been no serious project of a combination to resist the laws of the Union,
much less of a conspiracy to subvert the Union itself.

What though the elements of political strife remain? They are necessary
for the life of free States. What though there still