Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect.

Let me recommend the best medicine in the world: a long journey, at a mild season, through a pleasant country, in easy stages.

Crisis is the rallying cry of the tyrant.

The first question that offers itself is, whether the general form and aspect of the government be strictly republican? It is evident that no other form would be reconcileable with the genius of the people of America; with the fundamental principles of the revolution; or with that honourable determination which animates every votary of freedom, to rest all our political experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government.

Public opinion sets bounds to every government, and is the real sovereign in every free one.

American citizens are instrumental in carrying on a traffic in enslaved Africans, equally in violation of the laws of humanity and in defiance of those of their own country. The same just and benevolent motives which produced interdiction in force against this criminal conduct will doubtless be felt by Congress in devising further means of suppressing the evil.

The internal effects of a mutable policy are still more calamitous. It poisons the blessings of liberty itself.