we found angels in the form of kings to govern him? Let history answer
this question. Let us, then, pursue with courage and confidence our
own federal and republican principle, 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 all to the hundredth and thousandth generation; entertaining a
dull 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 practiced 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 in his greater
happiness hereafter. With all these blessings, what more is necessary
to make us a happy and a 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, on the exercise of duties which
comprehend everything dear and valuable to you, it is proper you should
understand what I deem the essential principles of this government,
and consequently those which ought to shape its administration. I
will compress them in the narrowest limits they will bear, stating the