no private ensign, no conqueror’s flapping eagles!  Government!  Honour the instrument by which we rule ourselves; but worship not a mechanical device, and call not a means an end!  Admirable means, but oh, the sorry end!  Therefore we’ll have no usurping Praetorian, no juggling sophist, no bailiff extravagant and unjust, no spendthrift squandering on idleness that which would pay just debts!  A ruler!  There’s no halo about a ruler’s head.  The people—­the people are the sacred thing, for they are the seed whence the future is to spring.  He who betrays his trust, which is to guard the seed,—­what is that man—­Emperor or President, Louis or George, Pharaoh or Caesar—­but a traitor and a breaker of the Law?  He may die by the axe, or he may die in a purple robe of a surfeit, but he dies!  The people live on, and his memory pays.  He has been a tyrant and a pygmy, and the ages hold him in contempt....  War!  There are righteous wars, and righteous men die in them, but the righteous man does not love war.  Conquest!  Conquest of ignorance, superstition, and indolence, conquest of the waste and void, of the forces of earth, air, and water, and of the dying beast within us, but no other conquest!  We attained Louisiana by fair trade, for the benefit of unborn generations.  Standing armies!  We want them not.  Navies!  The sea is the mother of life; why call her that of death?  Her highways are for merchant ships, for argosies carrying corn and oil, bearing travellers and the written thought of man; for voyages of discovery and happy intercourse, and all rich exchange from strand to strand.  Why stain the ocean red?  Is it not fairer when ’tis blue?  Guard coast-line and commerce, but we need no Armada for that.  Make no quarrels and enter none; so we shall be the exemplar of the nations....  Free Trade.  We are citizens and merchants of the world.  No man or woman but lives by trade and barter.  Long ago there was a marriage between the house of Give and the house of Take, and their child is Civilization.  Sultan or Czar may say, “Buy here, sell there, and at this price.  You are my slave.  Obey!” But who, in this century and this land, shall say that to me—­or to you?  Are we free men?  Then let us walk as such through the marts of the earth.  “Trade where you will,” saith Nature.  “It was so I brought the tree to the barren isle, and scattered the life of the seas.”  Authority of law!  Respect the law, and to that end let us have laws that are respectable.  Laws are made to be kept, else we live in a house of chicane.  But there is a danger that decrees may thicken until they form a dungeon grate for Freedom, until, like Gulliver, she is held down to earth by every several hair.  Few laws and just, and those not lightly broken.  The Contract between the States—­let it be kept.  It was pledged in good faith—­the cup went around among equals.  There is no more solemn covenant; we shall prosper but as we maintain it.  Is it not for the welfare and the grandeur