Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 44.djvu/18

 12 excellence intended to be conveyed when it is said, "Better is he who ruleth his own spirit than he who taketh a city."

The gaze of the world is fixed upon us. Nations look on, curious to know how this new system of government will move off, and what manner of men have been chosen to guide its earliest movements. It is, indeed, a new system. For, though coinciding in many particulars with that under which we lived so long, it yet differs from it in many particulars.

When the Constitution of 1787 was put in operation, the war of the revolution had been successfully closed. Peace prevailed throughout the whole land, and hallowed all its borders. The industrial operations of the country, long held back, now bounded forward and expanded with all the vigour and rankness of tropical vegetation beneath the influence of a midsummer sun. The trial which that Constitution had to encounter in its earliest, as well as in more matured existence, was simply one engendered by a conflict of these interests. The question was whether it could give protection to all those interests without becoming the partisan of one and the oppressor of another; or, in fact, whether it had the sustaining power to preserve its integrity against the influence of interest wielded by ambition. We have seen the result.

The case with our constitution is very different. It is put into operation in time of war, and its first movements are disturbed by the shock of battle. Its trial is one created by the urgencies of the contest. The question to be decided is, whether without injury to its own integrity, it can supply the machinery and afford the means requisite to conduct this war to that successful conclusion which the people in their hearts have resolved on, and which I trust has been decreed in that higher court from whose decisions there is no appeal. The solution of this question is in the bosom of the future.

But our system can never perish out like that to which I have alluded. When ambition and interest seized upon that, and destroyed its integrity, they were not allowed to appropriate the rule altogether to themselves. Fanaticism came forward and demanded to be received as a participant of power with them, and