“In the great journal of things happening under the sun, we, the American people, find our account running … We find ourselves in the peaceful possession, of the fairest portion of the earth….We find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tells us. We found ourselves the legal inheritors of these fundamental blessings. We toiled not in the acquirement or establishment of them – They are a legacy bequeathed us, by a once hardy, brave, and patriotic…race of ancestors. Theirs was the task (and nobly they performed it) to possess themselves, and through themselves, us, of this goodly land; and to uprear upon its hills and its valleys, a political edifice of liberty and equal rights, ’tis ours only, to transmit these…to the latest generation that fate shall permit the world to know….”
Abraham Lincoln
Courtesy of the National Center for Constitutional Studies (www.nccs.net)