difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called
by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all
Republicans, we are all Federalists. If there be any among us who would
wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them
stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of
opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it. I
know, indeed, that some honest men fear that a republican government
can not be strong, that this Government is not strong enough; but would
the honest patriot, in the full tide of successful experiment, abandon
a government which has so far kept us free and firm on the theoretic
and visionary fear that this Government, the world's best hope, may by
possibility want energy to preserve itself? I trust not. I believe
this, on the contrary, the strongest Government on earth. I believe it
the only one where every man, at the call of the law, would fly to the
standard of the law, and would meet invasions of the public order as
his own personal concern. Sometimes it is said that man can not be
trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with
the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms 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 degradations 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 acquisitions 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