attachment to the national government. Gentlemen, no one can
estimate more highly than I do the natural advantages of your city. No
one entertains a higher opinion than myself, also, of that spirit of
wise and liberal policy, which has actuated the government of your own
great State in the accomplishment of high objects, important to the
growth and prosperity both of the State and the city. But all these
local advantages, and all this enlightened state policy, could never
have made your city what it now is, without the aid and protection of a
general government, extending over all the States, and establishing for
all a common and uniform system of commercial regulation. Without
national character, without public credit, without systematic finance,
without uniformity of commercial laws, all other advantages possessed by
this city would have decayed and perished, like unripe fruit. A general
government was, for years before it was instituted, the great object of
desire to the inhabitants of this city. New York, at a very early day,
was conscious of her local advantages for commerce; she saw her destiny,
and was eager to embrace it; but nothing else than a general government
could make free her path before her, and set her forward on her
brilliant career. She early saw all this, and to the accomplishment of
this great and indispensable object she bent every faculty, and exerted
every effort. She was not mistaken. She formed no false judgment. At the
moment of the adoption of the Constitution, New York was the capital of
one State, and contained thirty-two or three thousand people. It now
contains more than two hundred thousand people, and is justly regarded
as the commercial capital, not only of all the United States, but of the
whole continent also, from the pole to the South Sea. Every page of her
history, for the last forty years, bears high and irresistible testimony
to the benefits and blessings of the general government. Her astonishing
growth is referred to, and quoted, all the world over, as one of the
most striking proofs of the effects of our Federal Union. To suppose her
now to be easy and indifferent, when notions are advanced tending to its
dissolution, would be to suppose her equally forgetful of the past and
blind to the present, alike ignorant of her own history and her own
interest, metamorphosed, from all that she has been, into a being tired
of its prosperity, sick of its own growth and greatness, and infat