Let us, then, with courage and confidence pursue our own federal and
republican principles, our attachment to our union and representative
government. . . . Entertaining a due sense of our equal right to the use of
our own faculties, to the acquisitions of our industry, to honour and
confidence from our fellow citizens, resulting not from birth but from our
actions and their sense of them; enlightened by a benign religion,
professed, indeed, and practised in various forms, yet all of them including
honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man; acknowledging
and adoring an overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations proves
that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness
hereafter; with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a
happy and prosperous people? Still one thing more, fellow citizens-a wise
and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another,
which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of
industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labour the
bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is
necessary to close the circle of our felicities.
Thomas Jefferson
First Inaugural Address
March 4, 1801
