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“the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the Republican model of Government, are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.”
Meaning & context
Washington presents the new constitutional government as a consequential political experiment whose success depends on the conduct of the American people and their institutions.
Source details
First Inaugural Address, final version, April 30, 1789, preserved by Founders Online / National Archives. The sentence belongs to Washington’s inaugural argument linking public duty, morality and the durability of republican government; it records an eighteenth-century political conviction, not an empirical forecast.