Of the two great political parties [he said] which have divided the opinions and feelings of our country, the candid and the just will now admit, that both have contributed splendid talents, spotless integrity, ardent patriotism, and disinterested sacrifices, to the formation and administration of the Government, and that both have required a liberal indulgence for a portion of human infirmity and error.  The revolutionary wars of Europe, commencing precisely at the moment when the Government of the United States first went into operation under the constitution, excited collisions of sentiments, and of sympathies, which kindled all the passions and embittered the conflict of parties, till the nation was involved in war, and the Union was shaken to its centre.  This time of trial embraced a period of five-and-twenty years, during which the policy of the Union in its relations with Europe constituted the principal basis of our own political divisions, and the most arduous part of action of the Federal Government.  With the catastrophe in which the wars of the French Revolution terminated, and our own subsequent peace with Great Britain, this baneful weed of party strife was uprooted.  From that time no difference of principle, connected with the theory of government, or with our intercourse with foreign nations, has existed or been called forth in force sufficient to sustain a continued combination of parties, or given more than wholesome animation to public sentiment or legislative debate.  Our political creed, without a dissenting voice that can be heard, is that the will of the people is the source, and the happiness of the people is the end, of all legitimate government upon earth—­that the best security for the beneficence, and the best guaranty against the abuse of power, consists in the freedom, the purity, and the frequency of popular elections.  That the General Government of the Union, and the separate Governments of the States, are all sovereignties of legitimate powers; fellow servants of the same masters, uncontrolled within their respective spheres—­uncontrollable by encroachments on each other.  If there have been those who doubted whether a confederated representative democracy was a government competent to the wise and orderly management of the common concerns of a mighty nation, those doubts have been dispelled.  If there have been projects of partial confederacies to be erected upon the ruins of the Union, they have been scattered to the winds.  If there have been dangerous attachments to one foreign nation, and antipathies against another, they have been extinguished.  Ten years of peace at home and abroad have assuaged the animosities of political contention and blended into harmony the most discordant elements of public opinion.  There still remains one effort of magnanimity, one sacrifice of prejudice and passion, to be made by the individuals throughout the nation who have heretofore followed the standards of political party.  It is that of discarding every remnant of rancor against each other, of embracing, as countrymen and friends, and of yielding to talents and virtue alone that confidence which, in times of contention for principle, was bestowed only upon those who bore the badge of party communion.