I
acknowledge my obligations to the masses of my countrymen, and to
them alone. Higher objects than personal aggrandizement gave
direction and energy to their exertions in the late canvass, and
they shall not be disappointed. They require at my hands
diligence, integrity, and capacity wherever there are duties to be
performed. Without these qualities in their public servants, more
stringent laws for the prevention or punishment of fraud,
negligence, and peculation will be vain. With them they will be
unnecessary.
But these are not the only points to which you look for vigilant
watchfulness. The dangers of a concentration of all power in the
general government of a confederacy so vast as ours are too
obvious to be disregarded. You have a right, therefore, to expect
your agents in every department to regard strictly the limits
imposed upon them by the Constitution of the United States. The
great scheme of our constitutional liberty rests upon a proper
distribution of power between the State and Federal authorities,
and experience has shown that the harmony and happiness of our
people must depend upon a just discrimination between the separate
rights and responsibilities of the States and your common rights
and obligations under the General Government; and here, in my
opinion, are the considerations which should form the true basis
of future concord in regard to the questions which have most
seriously disturbed public tranquillity.
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