美国第2任总统约翰·亚当斯就职演讲

Negligence of its regulations, inattention to its recommendations, if not disobedience to its authority, not only in individuals but in States,

soon appeared with their melancholy consequences_universal languor, jealousies and rivalries of States, decline of navigation and commerce, discouragement of necessary manufactures,

universal fall in the value of lands and their produce, contempt of public and private faith, loss of consideration and credit with foreign nations, and at length in discontents, animosities, combinations, partial conventions, and insurrection, threatening some great national calamity.

In this dangerous crisis the people of America were not abandoned by their usual good sense, presence of mind, resolution, or integrity. Measures were pursued to concert a plan to form a more perfect union, establish justice,

insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty.

The public disquisitions, discussions, and deliberations issued in the present happy Constitution of Government. Returning to the bosom of my country after a painful separation from it for ten years,

I had the honor to be elected to a station under the new order of things, and I have repeatedly laid myself under the most serious obligagions to support the Constitution.

The operation of it has equaled the most sanguine expectations of its friends, and from an habitual attention to it, satisfaction in its administration, and delight in its effects upon the peace, order, prosperity,

and happiness of the nation I have acquired an habitual attachment to it and veneration for it. What other form of government, indeed, can so well deserve our esteem and love?

There may be little solidity in an ancient idea that congregations of men into cities and nations are the most pleasing objects in the sight of superior intelligences, but this is very certain, that to a benevolent human mind there can be no spectacle presented by any nation more pleasing,