nt appeals are made to local
interests, to geographical distinctions, and to the policy and the pride
of particular States. It would sometimes appear as if it were a settled
purpose to convince the people that our Union is nothing but a jumble of
different and discordant interests, which must, erelong, be all resolved
into their original state of separate existence; as if, therefore, it
was of no great value while it should last, and was not likely to last
long. The process of disintegration begins by urging as a fact the
existence of different interests.

Sir, is not the end to which all this leads us obvious? Who does not see
that, if convictions of this kind take possession of the public mind,
our Union can hereafter be nothing, while it remains, but a connection
without harmony; a bond without affection; a theatre for the angry
contests of local feelings, local objects, and local jealousies? Even
while it continues to exist in name, it may by these means become
nothing but the mere form of a united government. My children, and the
children of those who sit around me, may meet, perhaps, in this chamber,
in the next generation; but if tendencies now but too obvious be not
checked, they will meet as strangers and aliens. They will feel no sense
of common interest or common country; they will cherish no common object
of patriotic love. If the same Saxon language shall fall from their
lips, it may be the chief proof that they belong to the same nation. Its
vital principle exhausted and gone, its power of doing good terminated,
the Union itself, become productive only of strife and contention, must
ultimately fall, dishonored and unlamented.

The honorable member from Carolina himself habitually indulges in
charges of usurpation and oppression against the government of his
country. He daily denounces its important measures, in the language in
which our Revolutionary fathers spoke of the oppressions of the mother
country. Not merely against executive usurpation, either real or
supposed, does he utter these sentiments, but against laws of Congress,
laws passed by large majorities, laws sanctioned for a course of years
by the people. These laws he proclaims, every hour, to be but a series
of acts of oppression. He speaks of them as if it were an admitted fact,
that such is their true character. This is the language he utters, these
are the sentiments he expresses, to the rising generation around him.
Are they sentiments and