, insure
domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the
general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves
and our posterity, do ordain this Constitution for the United States
of America." Again, in the awful convention of war, the people of
the United States, for the very ends just recited, have debated,
settled, and ordained certain fundamental truths, which must
henceforth be accepted and obeyed. Nor is any State nor any
individual wise who shall disregard them. They are to civil affairs
what the natural laws are to health--indispensable conditions of
peace and happiness. What are the ordinances given by the people,
speaking out of fire and darkness of war, with authority inspired by
that same God who gave the law from Sinai amid thunders and trumpet
voices? 1. That these United States shall be one and indivisible.
2. That States have not absolute sovereignty, and have no right to
dismember the Republic. 3. That universal liberty is indispensable
to republican government, and that slavery shall be utterly and
forever abolished.

Such are the results of war! These are the best fruits of the war.
They are worth all they have cost. They are foundations of peace.
They will secure benefits to all nations as well as to ours. Our
highest wisdom and duty is to accept the facts as the decrees of
God. We are exhorted to forget all that has happened. Yes, the
wrath, the conflict, the cruelty, but not those overruling decrees
of God which this war has pronounced. As solemnly as on Mount
Sinai, God says, "Remember! remember!" Hear it to-day. Under this
sun, tinder that bright child of the sun, our banner, with the eyes
of this nation and of the world upon us, we repeat the syllables of
God's providence and recite the solemn decrees: No more Disunion!
No more Secession! No more Slavery! Why did this civil war begin?
We do not wonder that European statesmen failed to comprehend this
conflict, and that foreign philanthropists were shocked at a
murderous war that seemed to have no moral origin, but, like the
brutal fights of beasts of prey, to have sprung from ferocious
animalism. This great nation, filling all profitable latitudes,
cradled between two oceans, with inexhaustible resources, with
riches increasing in an unparalleled ratio, by agriculture, by
manufactures, by commerce, with schools and churches, with books and
newspapers thick as leaves in our own forests, with inst