Compare our situation and the circumstances of that time with those of
the present day, and what, from the very words of Washington then, would
be his counsels to his countrymen now? Europe has still her set of
primary interests, with which we have little or a remote relation. Our
distant and detached situation with reference to Europe remains the
same. But we were then the only independent nation of this hemisphere,
and we were surrounded by European colonies, with the greater part of
which we had no more intercourse than with the inhabitants of another
planet. Those colonies have now been transformed into eight independent
nations, extending to our very borders, seven of them Republics like
ourselves, with whom we have an immensely growing commercial, and _must_
have and have already important political, connections; with reference
to whom our situation is neither distant nor detached; whose political
principles and systems of government, congenial with our own, must and
will have an action and counteraction upon us and ours to which we can
not be indifferent if we would.
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