under the comfortable obligation of paying the Wiggins loan, principal and interest.
The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions.
An Address Delivered Before the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Ill. January 27, 1837.[1]
As a subject for the remarks of the evening, "The perpetuation of our political institutions" is selected.
In the great journal of things happening under the sun, we, the American people, find our account running under date of the nineteenth century of the Christian era. We find ourselves in the peaceful possession of the fairest portion of the earth as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate. 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, when mounting the stage of existence, 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, but now lamented and departed, 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
- ↑ This society was formed by Lincoln and other young men in the fall of 1836. The speech was printed in the Sangamon Journal, February 3, 1838.
