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