70 We will not prove false to our trust. Shall we allow ignorance and arrogance and barbarism to cut up the great map of our heaven-united land into miserable clippings, leaving nothing but a litter of worthless pieces ? [No, no ! never !] Our country, our proud country, from sea to sea, with her majestic rivers, or rather, with her unique river system, and the glorious help of the canals, with her teeming mountains, and her fertile fields our country, with all her food and fuel and substance for shelter and clothing our country, my friends, is the primary condition of our social and political existence, and, indeed, of our own American liberty. With all due regard for our peculiar system of States, the State lines are, after all, but pencil marks on the great map. They have been changed, and will be changed again. They are not those deep grooves that history furrows, as she deeply cuts the border lines of nationalities. Not so with our country. The lines that mark her must never be changed at least, never contracted. [Applause.] Why ? Because a country that allows foreign governments to interfere with her domestic and national affairs that permits foreign jealousy to dictate in her councils is disgraced and ruined ; is a cripple among the nations a vassal and not a freeman. Germany can furnish you with some warning commentaries, ever since the times of Louis the Fourteenth. Even a crowned head of Germany, a noble prince of a petty principality, told his countrymen, recently, that in modern times genuine patriotism, void of narrow provincialism, cannot prosper in a confined petty State, still less in a mere city-State. And is there no danger of foreign interference ? There is ; even were it only for these two reasons, that England and France suffer greatly from our civil war, ajid because those two powers, which have always been unfriendly to the formation of a new united power, with the only exception of Italy in our own times, do not relish the growth of United American power. It has been openly acknowledged. Why ? Because we are already in the midst of a gigantic war, exclusively waged, on our part, for a great and noble idea. Such wars cannot be stopped at will ; as little as the tide can be bid to retire by a mop, as little as the Reformation could be calmed and stopped by the agreement of some ecclesiastics. Can we adopt peace founded upon the rending of this country ? Where will you rend it ? how will you keep peace ? Do you believe that we would have peace for a single twelvemonth after a division, the mere thought of which makes us shudder ? We speak the same language, inhabit one undivided country, have the same literature, the same form of thoughts, the same mould of feelings, the same institutions, except that one deplorable one ; we would daily and hourly influence one another, and what with their unpunished- pride and selfishness, their maddened and contused ambition, and their enthronement of gigantic error, we would not have rest, except by a total and unpardonable submission to them, and not even then. There is a law that pervades all history, because it pervades each house, that in the same degree as nature has destined people to live in the bonds of afi'ection and good-will, so will their quarrels be bitter, and their mutual irritation be grievous, when they once separate in acrimony and hostility. Brothers quarrel bitterest, when they quarrel at all. We had better fight it out. Complete victory alone can lead to a reconcilement, and
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