13 when we shall have rested from our labors. Some among us prefer for these columns a composite material; others, the pure white marble. Our fathers and our predecessors differed in the same way, and on the same point. What execrations should we not all unite in pronouncing on any statesman who heretofore, from mere disappointment and disgust at being overruled in his choice of materials for any new column then to be quarried, should have laid violent hands on the imperfect structure and brought it down to the earth, there to remain a wreck, instead of a citadel of a world’s best hopes! I remain now in the opinion I have uniformly expressed here and elsewhere, that these hasty threats of disunion are so unnatural that they will find no hand to execute them. We are of one race, one language, liberty, and faith ; engaged, indeed, in varied industry; but even that industry, so diversified, brings us into more intimate relations with each other than any other people, however homogeneous, arid though living under a consolidated Government, ever maintained. We languish throughout, if one joint of our Federal frame is smitten ; while it is certain that a part dissevered must perish. You may refine as you please about the structure of the Government, and say that it is a compact, and that a breach, by one of the States or by Congress, of any one article, absolves all the members from allegiance, and that the States may separate when they have, or fancy they have, cause for war. But once try to subvert it, and you will find that it is a Government of the whole people—as individuals, as well as a compact of States; that every individual member of the body-politic is conscious of his interest and power in it, and knows that he will be helpless, powerless, hopeless, when it shall have gone down. Mankind have a natural right, a natural instinct, and a natural capacity for self-government; and when, as here, they are sufficiently ripened bj culture, they will and must have self-government, and no other. The framers of our Constitution, with a wisdom that surpassed all previous understanding among men, adapted it to these inherent elements of human nature. He strangely, blindly misunderstands the anatomy of the great system who thinks that its only bonds, or even its strongest ligaments, are the written compact or even the multiplied and thoroughly ramified roads and thoroughfares of trade, commerce, and social intercourse. These arq strong indeed, but its chiefest instruments of cohesion—those which render it inseparable and indivisible— are the millions of fibres of millions of contented, happy human hearts, binding by their affections, their ambitions, and their best hopes equally the high and the low, the rich and the poor, the wise and unwise, the learned and the untutored, even the good and the bad, to a Government, the first, the last, and the only such one that has ever existed, which takes equal heed always of their wants, their wishes, and their opinions; and appeals to them all, individually, once in a year, or in two years, or at least in four years, for their expressed consent and renewal, without which it must cease. No, go where you will, and to what class you may, with commissions for your fatal service in one hand, and your bounty counted by the hundred or the thousand pieces of silver in the other, a thousand resisters will ^ise up for every recruit you can engage. On the banks equally of the St. Lawrence and of the Rio Grande, on the Atlantic and the Pacific coasts, on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico and in the dells of the Rocky Mountains, among the fishermen on the banks of Newfoundland, the weavers and spinners of Massachusetts, the stevedores of New York, the miners of Pennsylvania, Pike’s Peak, and California, the wheat-growers of Indiana, the cotton and the sugar planters on the Mississippi, among the voluntary citizens from every other land, not less than- the native born, the Christian and the Jew, among the Indians on the prairies, the contumacious Mormons in Deseret, the Africans free, the Africans in bondage, the inmates of hospitals and almshouses, and even the criminals in the penitentiaries, rehearse the story of your wrongs and their own, never so eloquently and never so mournfully, and appeal to them to rise. They will ask you, “Is this all?” “Are you more just than Washington, wiser than Hamilton, more humane than Jefferson ?” “ What new form of government or of union have you the power to establish, or even the cunning to devise, that will be more just, more safe, more free, more gentle, more beneficent, or more glorious than this?” And by these simple interrogatories you will be silenced and confounded.
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