the earth. The people of other nations, inhabitants of regions acquired
not by conquest, but by compact, have been united with us in the
participation of our rights and duties, of our burdens and blessings.
The forest has fallen by the ax of our woodsmen; the soil has been made
to teem by the tillage of our farmers; our commerce has whitened every
ocean. The dominion of man over physical nature has been extended by
the invention of our artists. Liberty and law have marched hand in
hand. All the purposes of human association have been accomplished as
effectively as under any other government on the globe, and at a cost
little exceeding in a whole generation the expenditure of other nations
in a single year.

Such is the unexaggerated picture of our condition under a Constitution
founded upon the republican principle of equal rights. To admit that
this picture has its shades is but to say that it is still the
condition of men upon earth. From evil - physical, moral, and political
- it is not our claim to be exempt. We have suffered sometimes by the
visitation of Heaven through disease; often by the wrongs and injustice
of other nations, even to the extremities of war; and, lastly, by
dissensions among ourselves - dissensions perhaps inseparable from the
enjoyment of freedom, but which have more than once appeared to
threaten the dissolution of the Union, and with it the overthrow of all
the enjoyments of our present lot and all our earthly hopes of the
future. The causes of these dissensions have been various, founded upon
differences of speculation in the theory of republican government; upon
conflicting views of policy in our relations with foreign nations; upon
jealousies of partial and sectional interests, aggravated by prejudices
and prepossessions which strangers to each other are ever apt to
entertain.