The American spirit was not about what happened in Washington, he said. If the republic was to be maintained and improved that would “be through the efforts and character of the individual.” The American spirit, by which he meant the spirit that lived between men, always survived, and “those who have scoffed at it from the days of the Stuarts and the Bourbons to the days of the Hohenzollerns have seen it rise and prevail over them.”
