shops, and our machinery, to perfect their own manufacture of the arms
requisite for their defence? Do not our whole people, interior and
seaboard, North, South, East, and West, alike feel proud of the
hardihood, the enterprise, the skill, and the courage of the Yankee
sailor, who has borne our flag far as the ocean bears its foam, and
caused the name and the character of the United States to be known and
respected wherever there is wealth enough to woo commerce, and
intelligence enough to honor merit? So long as we preserve, and
appreciate the achievements of Jefferson and Adams, of Franklin and
Madison, of Hamilton, of Hancock, and of Rutledge, men who labored for
the whole country, and lived for mankind, we cannot sink to the petty
strife which would sap the foundations, and destroy the political
fabric our fathers erected, and bequeathed as an inheritance to our
posterity forever.

Since the formation of the Constitution, a vast extension of
territory, and the varied relations arising there from, have presented
problems which could not have been foreseen. It is just cause for
admiration--even wonder, that the provisions of the fundamental law
should have been found so fully adequate to all the wants of
government, new in its organization, and new in many of the principles
on which it was founded. Whatever fears may have once existed as to
the consequences of territorial expansion, must give way before the
evidence which the past affords. The general government, strictly
confined to its delegated functions, and the States left in the
undisturbed exercise of all else, we have a theory and practice which
fits our government for immeasurable domain, and might, under a
millennium of nations, embrace mankind.

From the slope of the Atlantic our population with ceaseless tide has