From the first taking of our national census to the last are seventy years, and we find our population at the end of the period eight times as great as it was at the beginning.  The increase of those other things which men deem desirable has been even greater.  We thus have at one view what the popular principle, applied to Government through the machinery, of the States and the Union, has produced in a given time, and also what if firmly maintained it promises for the future.  There are already among us those who if the Union be preserved will live to see it contain 250,000,000.  The struggle of to-day is not altogether for to-day; it is for a vast future also.  With a reliance on Providence all the more firm and earnest, let us proceed in the great task which events have devolved upon us.

***

State of the Union Address
Abraham Lincoln
December 1, 1862

Fellow-Citizens of the Senate and House of Representatives: 

Since your last annual assembling another year of health and bountiful harvests has passed, and while it has not pleased the Almighty to bless us with a return of peace, we can but press on, guided by the best light He gives us, trusting that in His own good time and wise way all will yet be well.

The correspondence touching foreign affairs which has taken place during the last year is herewith submitted, in virtual compliance with a request to that effect made by the House of Representatives near the close of the last session of Congress.  If the condition of our relations with other nations is less gratifying than it has usually been at former periods, it is certainly more satisfactory than a nation so unhappily distracted as we are might reasonably have apprehended.  In the month of June last there were some grounds to expect that the maritime powers which at the beginning of our domestic difficulties so unwisely and unnecessarily, as we think, recognized the insurgents as a belligerent would soon recede from that position, which has proved only less injurious to themselves than to our own country.  But the temporary reverses which afterwards befell the national arms, and which were exaggerated by our own disloyal citizens abroad, have hitherto delayed that act of simple justice.

The civil war, which has so radically changed for the moment the occupations and habits of the American people, has necessarily disturbed the social condition and affected very deeply the prosperity of the nations with which we have carried on a commerce that has been steadily increasing throughout a period of half a century.  It has at the same time excited political ambitions and apprehensions which have produced a profound agitation throughout the civilized world.  In this unusual agitation we have forborne from taking part in any controversy between foreign states and between parties or factions in such states.  We have attempted no propagandism and acknowledged no revolution.