Experience has proved its sufficiency
in peace and in war; it has vindicated its authority through dangers and
afflictions, and sudden and terrible emergencies, which would have
crushed any system that had been less firmly fixed in the hearts 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 toward 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.
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