"We never dreamed," said he, "that an instructed and equal people, with a government yielding so readily to the touch of popular will, would have come to the trial of force against it.

We never thought that the remedy to get rid of a ruler would bring assassination into our political experience.

We never thought that political differences under an elective Presidency would bring in array the departments of the Government against one another to anticipate by ten months the operation of the regular election.

And yet we take them all, one after another, and we take them because we have grown to the full vigor of manhood.

But we have met by the powers of the Constitution these great dangers--prophesied when they would arise as likely to be our doom--the distractions of civil strife, the exhaustions of powerful war, the intervention of the regularity of power through the violence of assassination.