dodis.ch/41081

L’Agent spécial des Etats-Unis auprès de la Confédération, A. Dudley-Man, au Président de la Confédération, H. Druey1

The President of the United States has charged me with a special mission to the government of the Helvetic Confederation. I have now the honor to present my credentials.2 In performing this agreable duty permit my to give you an assurance of the lively and abiding solicitude of my country for the continued welfare of the Swiss and the perpetuity of the free institutions of Switzerland. Such solicitude is natural. Switzerland is not only a self-governing nation like America, but like America she is a Republic composed of sovereign commonwealths, zealously cooperating for the honor, the usefulness and the prosperity of the whole. Under the operations of her enlightened system, the oppressed have an asylum, the free a home in central Europe.

I indulge the hope, Mr President, that Switzerland will hereafter be better acquainted with America. Steam has so annihilated space that the frontiers of the two Unions are at present only about 13 days apart; and the distance between them, measured by time will, most probably, be considerably further diminished. The commercial intercourse between the two republics already large cannot fail to augment rapidly from year to year. The Swiss will assuredly find America at no distant day incomparably the best of all their customers for the products of their industry.

Switzerland and America as is perfectly apparent are bound to each other by inseverable political and commercial ties of paramount importance, to say nothing of the bonds created by an extended emigration of temperate, industrious, enterprizing citizens from the former to the latter.

I entertain a confident belief, Mr President, that the children of William Tell and of Washington will remain true to themselves, down to the latest posterity; and that their principles of government will, in the Providence of the Almighty, make the circuit of the globe, restoring to mankind its just title to the rights to which it was born. Those principles, happily, have nothing to fear from discussion, oral or written, nor from a dissemination of the truths and knowledge. Like light they travel, regardless of tyrants frowns, like light they convey to humanity the choicest blessings of Heaven.