January 27, 1837.
As a subject for the remarks of the evening, "The Perpetuation of our
Political Institutions" is selected.
In the great journal of things happening under the sun, we, the American
people, find our account running under date of the nineteenth century of
the Christian era. We find ourselves in the peaceful possession of the
fairest portion of the earth as regards extent of territory, fertility of
soil, and salubrity of climate. We find ourselves under the government
of a system of political institutions conducing more essentially to the
ends of civil and religious liberty than any of which the history of
former times tells us. We, when mounting the stage of existence, found
ourselves the legal inheritors of these fundamental blessings. We toiled
not in the acquirement or establishment of them; they are a legacy
bequeathed us by a once hardy, brave, and patriotic, but now lamented and
departed, race of ancestors. Theirs was the task (and nobly they
performed it) to possess themselves, and through themselves us, of this
goodly land, and to uprear upon its hills and its valleys a political
edifice of liberty and equal rights; it is ours only to transmit
these--the former unprofaned by the foot of an invader, the latter
undecayed by the lapse of time and untorn by usurpation--to the latest
generation that fate shall permit the world to know.
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