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selected by their voluntary suffrages [?], to perform, for their benefit, certain duties in a manner pointed out by the Constitution. Having performed these duties, our agency will expire, our powers cease, and public opinion will decide upon our public conduct. On that opinion depends not merely who shall administer government, but the form, and even the very existence of government itself. To perpetuate, in this free county that form of government which out ancestors established, with great toil and unexampled wisdom, must be the ardent wish of every enlightened philanthropist. To secure to the people the enjoyment of civil and religious liberty and their just rights, a knowledge of these rights, of their value, and importance to themselves, and their posterity, is indispensably necessary. Nor should this knowledge be confined to a few; the were universal its diffusion, the greater the security.