We are now a mighty nation, we are thirty---or about thirty millions of people, and we own and inhabit about one-fifteenth part of the dry land of the whole earth. We run our memory back over the pages of history for about eighty-two years and we discover that we were then a very small people in point of numbers, vastly inferior to what we are now, with a vastly less extent of country,---with vastly less of everything we deem desirable among men,---we look upon the change as exceedingly advantageous to us and to our posterity, and we fix upon something that happened away back, as in some way or other being connected with this rise of prosperity. We find a race of men living in that day whom we claim as our fathers and grandfathers; they were iron men, they fought for the principle that they were contending for; and we understood that by what they then did it has followed that the degree of prosperity that we now enjoy has come to us. We hold this annual celebration to remind ourselves of all the good done in this process of time of how it was done and who did it, and how we are historically connected with it; and we go from these meetings in better humor with ourselves---we feel more attached the one to the other, and more firmly bound to the country we inhabit. In every way we are better men in the age, and race, and country in which we live for these celebrations....
[Abraham Lincoln, 10 July 1858, Speech at Chicago, Illinois, Collected Works, Volume 2, p. 499.]
At the present time, about 248 years after the beginning, the United States is a mighty nation of about 340 million people, and we own and inhabit somewhere near six percent of the world's dry land and an even larger share of the world's habitable land, having added Alaska, Hawaii, and various islands to its bulk, as well as having regularized some borders and territories that were still in flux in Lincoln's day. There were only 32 states in 1858, Minnesota having just been admitted in May. We are the world's fourth largest country by land area, the world's third largest country by population. We cover just under two percent of the entire earth's surface and have just under five percent of the world's population. We are by far the world's wealthiest country, having about one and a half times the total wealth of the second wealthiest country. We are an agricultural superpower, the largest agricultural exporter by monetary amount (about eight percent of the entire world market) and the second largest by tonnage; we are an industrial superpower, the second largest manufacturing exporter (about 16 percent of the entire world market). And, of course, nobody needs to be reminded that we are a military superpower.
It has been a rocky road the entire journey. Just three years after Lincoln's speech, Lincoln became President due to carrying the Electoral College, having received almost no votes at all in the South, and the United States collapsed into a terrible and brutal civil war. But here we still are, and still a republic, and no power in the world strong enough to threaten us, except ourselves. Republics require a few things to endure: a brutal honesty and frankness, a fortitude to endure difficulties without tantrums, a sense of honor and a desire to uphold the traditions of one's liberties, a ruthless vigilance against statist intrusions on the power of citizens, a willingness to put country above faction and constitution above party. All of these, I fear, have taken a severe beating in the past few decades. But they have not completely vanished, and as long as they have not vanished, there is still great hope for the future.