6 and obey its mandate. Better might a parent turn his child out of doors,, or a child refuse shelter or maintenance to a parent, because no statute had enjoined the duty or forbidden the crime, and hope to avoid the results that flow from wrong, than a people expect to find happiness and safety in the course which these men advise; for men may escape the temporal consequences of guilt by death, while nations always survive long enough to feel the retribution due to their own misconduct. Thus far the North has avoided the sin of the South, has refused to admit the mischievous doctrine that a people, one in race and in language, substantially one in religious faith, separated by no natural line of demarcation, can dismember their country without a violation of natural and moral right, even if they violated no legal obligation. So far, too, the North has escaped the greater part of the suffering, which the South has had to endure, has been tranquil, prosperous, united, and save in the loss of its children who have fallen while fighting for its cause, free from all the worst evils of war. If it perseveres to the end in the path of honor and duty ; if the fire in which it is now glowing, and the blood shed in common on”so many battle-fields, shall weld and harden the Northern States indissolubly into one people, then the war will be, in the truest sense, successful, even if we fail in regaining the whole South. It is not the extent of territory that makes the true greatness of a nation ; it is united and harmonious councils, a common sentiment of duty, that submission of each and every part to the will of the whole, by which law displaces violence, and order grows out of confusion. But if we become, when the war is at an end, what the doctrines of Mr. Calhoun and his disciples would make us, a mosaic of fragments, a country to which no man can wisely give his affections, because no man can tell how soon it may be resolved into its constituent elements by the magic wand of an ordinance of secession ; if our first and highest thought, our sole bond of union is to be the consideration by what route each section can best reach a market, or where it can most advantageously sell its wares ; if this is to be from time to time determined by conventions, called and voting under those influences of force and fraud, which are even now arising like exhalations from the ground at the voice of faction ; if the choice of to-day can be recalled to-morrow, at the prompting of popular caprice or political ambition ; if, in short, the tie which should bind the members of a nation as indissolubly together as those of a family, is to be exchanged for a series of alliances, such as Mr. Hughes proposes, discord and confusion will take the place'of the tranquility that has prevailed hitherto, and help must be sought from above, for there would be little here below. Civil war would probably follow, and a state of suffering ensue, far greater than that which we have seen at the South, because the struggle would be, not between different sections, but from county to county, from township to township, perhaps from street to street. If Schuylkill, Lehigh, Berks, or Montgomery, could indeed be brought to sanction an ordinance declaring that the Union that now binds us together is destroyed, the outrage would, we may feel sure, be resisted by Chester, Delaware, Lancaster, and Allegheny. The city of New York might be arrayed at
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