than were foreseen; and now, at this new epoch in our existence as one nation, with our Union purified by sorrows, and strengthened by conflict, and established by the virtue of the people, the greatness of the occasion invites us once more to repeat, with solemnity, the pledges of our fathers to hold ourselves answerable before our fellow-men for the success of the republican form of government. Experience has proved its sufficiency in peace and in war; it has vindicated its authority through dangers, and afflic tions, and sudden and terrible emergencies, which would have crushed any system that had been less firmly fixed in the heart of the people. At the inauguration of Washington the foreign relations of the country were few, and its trade was repressed by hostile regulations; now. all the civilized nations of the globe welcome our commerce, and their Governments profess towards us amity. Then our country felt its way hesitatingly along an untried path, with States so little bound together by rapid means of communication as to be hardly known to one another, and with historic traditions extending over very few years; now intercourse between the States is swift and intimate; the experience of centuries has been crowded into a few generations, and has created an intense, indestructible nationality. Then our jurisdiction did not reach beyond the inconvenient boundaries of the territory which had achieved independence; now, through cessions of lands, first colonized by Spain and France, the country has acquired a more complex character, and has for its natural limits the chain of lakes, the Gulf of Mexico, and on the east and the west the two great oceans. Other nations were wasted by civil wars for ages before they could establish for themselves the necessary degree of unity; the latent conviction that our form of government is the best ever known to the world, has enabled us to emerge from civil war within four years, with a complete vindication of the constitutional authority of the General Government, and with our local liberties and State institutions unimpaired. 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 every one 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-centred and truly independent. Here more and more care is given to provide education for every one 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 un shackled 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 every thing 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 Frovidential 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 transit 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? "ANDREW JOHNSON. “WASHINGTON, December 4, 1865." CHAPTER XIX. CONCLUSION. PRESIDENT JOHNSON, providentially called to the chief executive chair at an extraordinary crisis, when the country was first emerging from the blood and smoke of a terrible civil war, and when the world was horror-stricken by the news of Lincoln's assassination-President Johnson assumed his onerous duties at a moment's notice, and has since been discharging them with an energy, tact, and discretion that cannot be too highly extolled. Without a parallel in the history of any other people, in its spirit of fraternal magnanimity, stands President Johnson's wise and beneficent policy of reconciliation and reunion. Thus it is that he is accepted by the Southern people, not as a conquering despot, but as a welcome benefactor; and hence their progress in the great task enjoined upon them of rebuilding their State institutions upon the enduring corner-stones of the sovereignty of the Union and universal liberty. Never did weighter burden press upon a human being than has rested upon the President every moment since he assumed the duties of his exalted station. His doctrine, that the secession of a State could not carry it out of the Union, and that as soon as it grounded its arms it resumed its former status in the federal group, has been of infinite service to him in his well-directed efforts for a speedy restoration. This most desirable object is in a way of rapid accomplishment under his well-planned auspices. His first annual message at the opening of the thirty-ninth Congress, which we have given above, by its calm statement of the situation, and the manifest knowledge of its author how best to meet the political crisis, is so admirably adapted as a safe and rational guide for both legislative and popular action, as to secure for its statements, its reasonings, and its suggestions a strong and universal approbation from the masses of the people. The sympathy of the masses is the firm tower upon which the President leans for support in his future, as he has always done in his past. It has never failed nor deserted him in former times, when, to common observers, all seemed dark and dismal around him, and it will not desert him now. If a rabid fanaticism, if a bitter prejudice shall attempt to oppose his wise and noble policy, he will meet their attacks "Firm as a rock of the ocean, that braves The people, whose Union he will have saved and cemented by bonds that never can be broken, |