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 of industry and improvement, and shall
not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the
sum of good government; and this is necessary to close the circle of our
felicities.

About to enter, fellow-citizens, upon the exercise of duties which
comprehend every thing dear and valuable to you, it is proper you should
understand what I deem the essential principles of our government, and
consequently, those which ought to shape its administration. I will