I join with you in gladness at the victory we celebrate to-day,--not of the cartridge-box, but of the ballot-box. No victories of the cartridge-box have involved higher principles or more important results than that just won by the ballot-box. A poet, whose home is in Concord, has said that the shot fired here was heard round the world. I doubt not that our victory just achieved will awaken reverberations also to be heard round the world. All men struggling for rights, vindicating liberal ideas, seeking human improvement, maintaining republican government, will be encouraged, when they hear of yesterday. It will be good news to Garibaldi in Italy, good news to the French now subjected to imperial power, good news to English Reformers,--and so also will it be good news to all among us who love Liberty, for it proclaims that at last Liberty has prevailed. Every four years we choose a new President; but it rarely happens that we choose a new government, as was done yesterday. A new order of things is inaugurated, with new auspices, lifting the Republic once more to that platform of principles on which it was originally placed by the Fathers. What victory of the cartridge-box ever did so much? Looking at the vote in its practical significance, several things may be considered as established and proclaimed by the American people, so that hereafter they shall not be drawn in question. Of these I place foremost the irrevocable decree, according to the very words of Madison, that it is “wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there can be property in men,”[38]--that, therefore, Slavery, if it exists anywhere, is sectional, and must derive such life as it has from local law, and not from the Constitution,--in opposition to the pretension so often put forward in its name, that Slavery is national and Freedom sectional. Then again the American people have declared, that all outlying Territories, so immense in extent, and destined to the support of unknown millions, shall be consecrated to Freedom, so that the vast outstretched soil shall never know the footprint of a slave: all of which is the natural conclusion and corollary from the first decree. And yet again it is declared, that in the administration of the National Government the original policy of the Fathers shall be adopted, in opposition to the policy of Slavery, which for the last twelve years has been so tyrannical, and for the last forty years has made its barbaric impress on the country. And still further, the decree goes forth that the Slave-Trade shall be suppressed in reality as in name, that the statutes against it shall be vigorously enforced, and the power of the Government directed in good faith against it, all efforts to the contrary notwithstanding. These things were yesterday proclaimed by the American people solemnly, and in a way from which there is no appeal. It was done by a vote destined to be ever memorable and a landmark of history.