THE PERPETUATION OF OUR POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS, JANUARY 27, 1837

In the great journal of things happening under the sun, we, the
American People, find our account running under date of the nineteenth
century of the Christian era.--We find ourselves in the peaceful
possession of the fairest portion of the earth, as regards extent of
territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate. We find
ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions
conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty
than any of which the history of former times tells us. We, when
mounting the stage of existence, found ourselves the legal inheritors
of these fundamental blessings. We toiled not in the acquirement or
establishment of them--they are a legacy bequeathed us by a once hardy,
brave, and patriotic, but now lamented and departed, race of ancestors.
Theirs was the task (and nobly they performed it) to possess
themselves, and through themselves us, of this goodly land, and to
uprear upon its hills and its valleys a political edifice of liberty
and equal rights; 'tis ours only to transmit these, the former
unprofaned by the foot of an invader; the latter undecayed by the lapse
of time and untorn by usurpation--to the latest generation that fate
shall permit the world to know. This task gratitude to our fathers,
justice to ourselves, duty to posterity, and love for our species in
general, all imperatively require us faithfully to perform.

How, then, shall we perform it?--At what point shall we expect the
approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall
we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush