The throngs of emigrants that crowd to our shores are witnesses of the confidence of all peoples in our permanence.  Here is the great land of free labor, where industry is blessed with unexampled rewards and the bread of the workingman is sweetened by the consciousness that the cause of the country “is his own cause, his own safety, his own dignity.”  Here everyone enjoys the free use of his faculties and the choice of activity as a natural right.  Here, under the combined influence of a fruitful soil, genial climes, and happy institutions, population has increased fifteen-fold within a century.  Here, through the easy development of boundless resources, wealth has increased with twofold greater rapidity than numbers, so that we have become secure against the financial vicissitudes of other countries and, alike in business and in opinion, are self-centered and truly independent.  Here more and more care is given to provide education for everyone born on our soil.  Here religion, released from political connection with the civil government, refuses to subserve the craft of statesmen, and becomes in its independence the spiritual life of the people.  Here toleration is extended to every opinion, in the quiet certainty that truth needs only a fair field to secure the victory.  Here the human mind goes forth unshackled in the pursuit of science, to collect stores of knowledge and acquire an ever-increasing mastery over the forces of nature.  Here the national domain is offered and held in millions of separate freeholds, so that our fellow-citizens, beyond the occupants of any other part of the earth, constitute in reality a people.  Here exists the democratic form of government; and that form of government, by the confession of European statesmen, “gives a power of which no other form is capable, because it incorporates every man with the state and arouses everything that belongs to the soul.”

Where in past history does a parallel exist to the public happiness which is within the reach of the people of the United States?  Where in any part of the globe can institutions be found so suited to their habits or so entitled to their love as their own free Constitution?  Every one of them, then, in whatever part of the land he has his home, must wish its perpetuity.  Who of them will not now acknowledge, in the words of Washington, that “every step by which the people of the United States have advanced to the character of an independent nation seems to have been distinguished by some token of providential agency”?  Who will not join with me in the prayer that the Invisible Hand which has led us through the clouds that gloomed around our path will so guide us onward to a perfect restoration of fraternal affection that we of this day may be able to transmit our great inheritance of State governments in all their rights, of the General Government in its whole constitutional vigor, to our posterity, and they to theirs through countless generations?