As the inhabitants of those burning
climates which lie beneath a tropical sun sigh for the coolness
of the mountain and the grove, so (all history instructs us) do
nations which have basked for a time in the torrid blaze of
unmitigated liberty too often call upon the shades of despotism,
even of military despotism, to cover them--a protection which
blights while it shelters; which dwarfs the intellect and stunts
the energies of man, but to which a wearied nation willingly
resorts from intolerable heats and from perpetual danger of
convulsion.
Our lot is happily cast in the temperate zone of freedom, the
clime best suited to the development of the moral qualities of
the human race, to the cultivation of their faculties, and to the
security as well as the improvement of their virtues; a clime,
not exempt, indeed, from variations of the elements, but
variations which purify while they agitate the atmosphere that we
breathe. Let us be sensible of the advantages which it is our
happiness to enjoy. Let us guard with pious gratitude the flame
of genuine liberty, that fire from heaven, of which our
Constitution is the holy depository; and let us not, for the
chance of rendering it more intense and more radiant, impair its
purity or hazard its extinction.
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