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.

“The collisions of party spirit, which originate in speculative opinions, or in different views of administrative policy, are in their nature transitory.  Those which are founded on geographical divisions, adverse interests of soil, climate, and modes of domestic life, are more permanent, and therefore, perhaps, more dangerous.  It is this which gives inestimable value to the character of our Government, at once federal and national.  It holds out to us a perpetual admonition to preserve, alike, and with equal anxiety, the rights of each individual State in its own Government, and the rights of the whole nation in that of the Union.  Whatever is of domestic concernment, unconnected with the other members of the Union, or with foreign lands, belongs exclusively to the administration of the State Governments.  Whatsoever directly involves the rights and interests of the federative fraternity,