Alexandria Gazette

A Favored People.

If there is a nation on earth which has more abundant cause for gratitude to the "Great Father of mercies" than others, it is the American people—these United States. Spared from the numerous calamities which have been, in the Providence of God, visited upon other nations; exempted from famine, desolating pestilence, and from discord: enjoying the most enlightened government which human intelligence could devise, with the blessing of supreme goodness and wisdom, confirmed and tested by the experience of seventy years; a people possessing every religious privilege, and in the midst of that glorious light revealed in the dispensation of grace and mercy by our Redeemer; and now in the consummation of that most excellent of all temporal blessings, the blessings of peace—when the trump no longer sounds to battle—no longer calls up the deadly and malignant passions of depraved humanity—but peace, and justice, and happiness, reign triumphant in our most favored land; do not all these mercies call for every demonstration of joy and gratitude, private and public.