2921. FEDERAL GOVERNMENT, A frugal.—[continued].
Kindly separated by nature
and a wide ocean from the exterminating
havoc of one quarter of the globe;
too high-minded to endure the degradations
of the others; possessing a chosen
country, with room enough for our descendants
to the hundredth and thousandth generation;
entertaining a due sense of our equal
right to the use of our own faculties, to the
acquisitions of our industry, to honor and
confidence from our fellow citizens, resulting,
not from birth, but from our actions, and
their sense of them; enlightened by a benign
religion, professed, indeed, and practiced in
various forms, yet all of them inculcating
honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the
love of man; acknowledging and adoring an
overruling Providence, which, by all its dispensations,
proves that it delights in the happiness
of man here and his greater happiness
hereafter,—with all these blessings, what more
is necessary to make us a happy and prosperous
people? Still one thing more, fellow-citizens—a wise and frugal government, which
shall restrain men from injuring one another,
which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate
their own pursuits of industry and improvement,
and shall not take from the mouth
of labor the bread it has earned. This is the
sum of good government, and this is necessary
to close the circle of our felicities.—
First Inaugural Address. Washington ed. viii, 3.
Ford ed., viii, 3.
(1801)
