of their becoming aliens, rivals, enemies. And if novelties are to
be shunned, believe me, the most alarming of all novelties, the most
wild of all projects, the most rash of all attempts, is that of
rendering us in pieces, in order to preserve our liberties and
promote our happiness. But why is the experiment of an extended
republic to be rejected, merely because it may comprise what is new?
Is it not the glory of the people of America, that, whilst they
have paid a decent regard to the opinions of former times and other
nations, they have not suffered a blind veneration for antiquity,
for custom, or for names, to overrule the suggestions of their own
good sense, the knowledge of their own situation, and the lessons of
their own experience? To this manly spirit, posterity will be
indebted for the possession, and the world for the example, of the
numerous innovations displayed on the American theatre, in favor of
private rights and public happiness. Had no important step been
taken by the leaders of the Revolution for which a precedent could
not be discovered, no government established of which an exact model
did not present itself, the people of the United States might, at
this moment have been numbered among the melancholy victims of
misguided councils, must at best have been laboring under the weight
of some of those forms which have crushed the liberties of the rest
of mankind. Happily for America, happily, we trust, for the whole
human race, they pursued a new and more noble course. They
accomplished a revolution which has no parallel in the annals of
human society. They reared the fabrics of governments which have no
model on the face of the globe. They formed the design of a great
Confederacy, which it is incumbent on their successors to improve
and perpetuate. If their works betray imperfections, we wonder at
the fewness of them. If they erred most in the structure of the
Union, this was the work most difficult to be executed; this is the