Whitelaw Reid: “What right had any man to a share in shaping the legislation of the country who had no settled interest in the country?”

They appeared at times when public men often seemed to be groping in the dark on an unknown road, but it is now evident that the road which has been taken is substantially the road they marked out.

As a foreign critic said in comment on one of the addresses: "The author is one man who knows what he thinks about the new policy required by the new situation in which his country is placed, and has the courage and candor to say it.

No matter what we wish, the old continental isolation is gone forever.

Extravagant living left nearly every planter enormously in debt when the war came.