We are the nation of human progress, and who will, what can, set limits to our onward march? Providence is with us, and no earthly power can. We are entering on its untrodden space, with the truths of God in our minds, beneficent objects in our hearts, and with a clear conscience unsullied by the past. The expansive future is our arena, and for our history. We have no interest in the scenes of antiquity, only as lessons of avoidance of nearly all their examples. We have had patriots to defend our homes, our liberties, but no aspirants to crowns or thrones nor have the American people ever suffered themselves to be led on by wicked ambition to depopulate the land, to spread desolation far and wide, that a human being might be placed on a seat of supremacy. Our annals describe no scenes of horrid carnage, where men were led on by hundreds of thousands to slay one another, dupes and victims to emperors, kings, nobles, demons in the human form called heroes. It is our unparalleled glory that we have no reminiscences of battle fields, but in defence of humanity, of the oppressed of all nations, of the rights of conscience, the rights of personal enfranchisement. What friend of human liberty, civilization, and refinement, can cast his view over the past history of the monarchies and aristocracies of antiquity, and not deplore that they ever existed? What philanthropist can contemplate the oppressions, the cruelties, and injustice inflicted by them on the masses of mankind, and not turn with moral horror from the retrospect?Īmerica is destined for better deeds. Besides, the truthful annals of any nation furnish abundant evidence, that its happiness, its greatness, its duration, were always proportionate to the democratic equality in its system of government.… It presides in all the operations of the physical world, and it is also the conscious law of the soul - the self-evident dictates of morality, which accurately defines the duty of man to man, and consequently man’s rights as man.
It is so destined, because the principle upon which a nation is organized fixes its destiny, and that of equality is perfect, is universal. On the contrary, our national birth was the beginning of a new history, the formation and progress of an untried political system, which separates us from the past and connects us with the future only and so far as regards the entire development of the natural rights of man, in moral, political, and national life, we may confidently assume that our country is destined to be the great nation of futurity. The American people having derived their origin from many other nations, and the Declaration of National Independence being entirely based on the great principle of human equality, these facts demonstrate at once our disconnected position as regards any other nation that we have, in reality, but little connection with the past history of any of them, and still less with all antiquity, its glories, or its crimes.
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