Venerable men! you have come down to us from a former generation. Heaven has bounteously lengthened out your lives, that you might behold this joyous day.

The materials of wealth are in the earth, in the seas, and in their natural and unaided productions.

The law: it has honored us; may we honor it.

He who tampers with the currency robs labor of its bread.

A disordered currency is one of the greatest political evils. It undermines the virtues necessary for the support of the social system, and encourages propensities destructive to its happiness. It wars against industry, frugality, and economy, and it fosters the evil spirits of extravagance and speculation.

Mind is the great lever of all things; human thought is the process by which human ends are ultimately answered; and the diffusion of knowledge, so astonishing in the last half-century, has rendered innumerable minds, variously gifted by nature, competent to be competitors or fellow-workers on the theatre of intellectual operation.

It is no monopoly in any other sense than as a man's own house is a monopoly. But a man's right to his own invention is a very different matter. It is no more a monopoly for him to possess that, than to possess his own homestead .