These are excitements to duty; but they are not suggestions of doubt.  Our history and our condition, all that is gone before us, and all that surrounds us, authorize the belief, that popular governments, though subject to occasional variations, in form perhaps not always for the better, may yet, in their general character, be as durable and permanent as other systems.  We know, indeed, that in our country any other is impossible.  The principle of free governments adheres to the American soil.  It is bedded in it, immovable as its mountains.

And let the sacred obligations which have devolved on this generation, and on us, sink deep into our hearts.  Those who established our liberty and our government are daily dropping from among us.  The great trust now descends to new hands.  Let us apply ourselves to that which is presented to us, as our appropriate object.  We can win no laurels in a war for independence.  Earlier and worthier hands have gathered them all.  Nor are there places for us by the side of Solon, and Alfred, and other founders of states.  Our fathers have filled them.  But there remains to us a great duty of defence and preservation; and there is opened to us, also, a noble pursuit, to which the spirit of the times strongly invites us.  Our proper business is improvement.  Let our age be the age of improvement.  In a day of peace, let us advance the arts of peace and the works of peace.  Let us develop the resources of our land, call forth its powers, build up its institutions, promote all its great interests, and see whether we also, in our day and generation, may not perform something worthy to be remembered.  Let us cultivate a true spirit of union and harmony.  In pursuing the great objects which our condition points out to us, let us act under a settled conviction, and an habitual feeling, that these twenty-four States are one country.  Let our conceptions be enlarged to the circle of our duties.  Let us extend our ideas over the whole of the vast field in which we are called to act.  Let our object be, OUR COUNTRY, OUR WHOLE COUNTRY, AND NOTHING BUT OUR COUNTRY.  And, by the blessing of God, may that country itself become a vast and splendid monument, not of oppression and terror, but of Wisdom, of Peace, and of Liberty, upon which the world may gaze with admiration for ever!

[Footnote 1:  General Warren, at the time of his decease, was Grand Master of the Masonic Lodges in America.]

[Footnote 2:  An interesting account of the voyage of the early emigrants to the Maryland Colony, and of its settlement, is given in the official report of Father White, written probably within the first month after the landing at St. Mary’s.  The original Latin manuscript is still preserved among the archives of the Jesuits at Rome.  The “Ark” and the “Dove” are remembered with scarcely less interest by the descendants of the sister colony, than is the “Mayflower” in New England, which thirteen years earlier, at the same season of the year, bore thither the Pilgrim Fathers.]