As a subject for the remarks of the evening "The perpetuation of our
political institutions" is selected. In the great journal of things
happening under the sun, we, the American people, find our account
running under the 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 remounting the stage of existence, found
ourselves the legal inheritors of these fundamental blessings. We toiled
not in the acquirement or the establishment of them; they are a legacy
bequeathed to 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 rear upon its
hills and valleys a political edifice of liberty and equal rights; 'tis
ours only to transmit these,--the former unprofaned by the foot of the
invader; the latter undecayed by lapse of time. This, our duty to
ourselves and to our posterity, and love for our species in general,
imperatively require us 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 across the ocean and
crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa
combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their