5. The change in this respect, during the last ten years is patent. No European nation has, probably, just at this moment as much real respect for America, as the English, though it is still mixed with great ignorance, and a very sincere dislike. Still, the enterprise, activity, and growing power of the country are forcing themselves on the attention of our kinsmen; and if the government understood its foreign relations as well as it does its domestic, and made a proper exhibition of maritime preparation and of maritime force, this people would hold the balance in many of the grave questions that are now only in abeyance, in European politics. Hitherto we have been influenced by every vacillation in English interests, and it is quite time to think of turning the tables, and of placing, as far as practicable, American interests above the vicissitudes of those of other people. The thing is more easily done, than is commonly imagined, but a party politician is rarely a statesman, the subordinate management necessary to the one, being death to the comprehensive views that belong to the other. The peculiar nature of the American institutions, and the peculiar geographical situation of the country, moreover, render higher qualities necessary, perhaps, to make a statesman here, than elsewhere.