all care about all other nations in the world.  No citizen of the United States has, or ever will have, the wish to see this country degraded to the rotting vegetation of a Paraguay, or the mummy existence of a Japan and China.  The feeling of self-dignity, and the expansiveness of that enterprizing spirit which is congenial to freemen, would revolt against the very idea of such a degrading national captivity.  But if there were even a will to live such a mummy life, there is no possibility to do so.  The very existence of your great country, the principles upon which it is founded, its geographical position, its present scale of civilization, and all its moral and material interests, would lead on your people not only to maintain, but necessarily more and more to develop your foreign intercourse.  Then, being in so many respects linked to mankind at large, you cannot have the will, nor yet the power, to remain indifferent to the outward world.  And if you cannot remain indifferent, you must resolve to throw your weight into that balance in which the fate and condition of man is weighed.  You are a power on earth.  You must be a power on earth, and must therefore accept all the consequences of this position.  You cannot allow that any power in the world should dispose of the fate of that great family of mankind, of which you are so pre-eminent a member:  else you would resign your proud place and your still prouder future, and be a power on earth no more.

I hope I have sufficiently shown, that should even that doctrine of non-interference have been established by the founders of your republic, that which might have been very proper to your infancy would not now be suitable to your manhood.  It is a beautiful word of Montesquieu, that republics are to be founded on virtue.  And you know that virtue between man and man, as sanctioned by our Christian religion, is but an exercise of that great principle—­“Thou shalt do to others as thou desirest others to do to thee.”  Thus I might rely simply upon your generous republican hearts, and upon the consistency of your principles; but I beg to add some essential differences in material respects, between your present condition and that of yore.  Of your twenty-four millions, more than nineteen are spread over yonder immense territory, the richest of the world, employed in the cultivation of the soil, that honourable occupation, which in every time has proved to be the most inexhaustible and most unfailing source of public welfare and private happiness, as also the most unwavering ally of freedom, and the most faithful fosterer of all those upright, noble, generous sentiments which the constant intercourse with ever young, ever great, ever beautiful virtue, imparts to man.  Now this immense agricultural interest, desiring large markets, at the same time affords a solid basis to your manufacturing industry, and in consequence to your immensely developed commerce.  All this places such a difference between the republic