and force; that it was not possible for this nation to become a “propagandist” of free principles without arraying against it the combined powers of Europe, and that the result was more likely to be the overthrow of republican liberty here than its establishment there.  History has been written in vain for those who can doubt this.  France had no sooner established a republican form of government than she manifested a desire to force its blessings on all the world.  Her own historian informs us that, hearing of some petty acts of tyranny in a neighboring principality, “the National Convention declared that she would afford succor and fraternity to all nations who wished to recover their liberty, and she gave it in charge to the executive power to give orders to the generals of the French armies to aid all citizens who might have been or should be oppressed in the cause of liberty.”  Here was the false step which led to her subsequent misfortunes.  She soon found herself involved in war with all the rest of Europe.  In less than ten years her Government was changed from a republic to an empire, and finally, after shedding rivers of blood, foreign powers restored her exiled dynasty and exhausted Europe sought peace and repose in the unquestioned ascendency of monarchical principles.  Let us learn wisdom from her example.  Let us remember that revolutions do not always establish freedom.  Our own free institutions were not the offspring of our Revolution.  They existed before.  They were planted in the free charters of self-government under which the English colonies grew up, and our Revolution only freed us from the dominion of a foreign power whose government was at variance with those institutions.  But European nations have had no such training for self-government, and every effort to establish it by bloody revolutions has been, and must without that preparation continue to be, a failure.  Liberty unregulated by law degenerates into anarchy, which soon becomes the most horrid of all despotisms.  Our policy is wisely to govern ourselves, and thereby to set such an example of national justice, prosperity, and true glory as shall teach to all nations the blessings of self-government and the unparalleled enterprise and success of a free people.

We live in an age of progress, and ours is emphatically a country of progress.  Within the last half century the number of States in this Union has nearly doubled, the population has almost quadrupled, and our boundaries have been extended from the Mississippi to the Pacific.  Our territory is checkered over with railroads and furrowed with canals.  The inventive talent of our country is excited to the highest pitch, and the numerous applications for patents for valuable improvements distinguish this age and this people from all others.  The genius of one American has enabled our commerce to move against wind and tide and that of another has annihilated distance in the transmission of intelligence.