proffers is an unnatural and impossible
one. It not only alienates from the Union Western Texas, East Tennessee,
and other regions wherein a majority have ever been and still are
devoted to the old flag, but insists on wresting from us West
Virginia--that is, that portion of the old State of Virginia which
slopes toward the Ohio river--a region larger in area than three of the
States left in the Union put together--a region which, never having been
practically slaveholding save to a very limited extent, has ever been
preponderately and earnestly loyal--a region mainly held to-day, as it
has almost uniformly been held, by the Unionists--a region which, if
surrendered to the Confederacy, interposes a wedge of foreign territory
between Pennsylvania and Ohio, the East and the West--leaving them
connected by a shred (see map) not one hundred miles broad, and
rendering a farther and more fatal disruption of the Union wellnigh
inevitable. When the Baltimore and Ohio railroad shall traverse for the
most part a foreign country--when the Mississippi, through all the lower
part of its course, shall have been surrendered by us to a power
inevitably hostile to our growth and jealous of our prosperity--when
Wheeling and Memphis shall have become foreign ports, and Cincinnati and
St. Louis frontier cities--the gravitation of the Free West toward the
country to which her rivers are hastening and through which her bulky
staples find their natural outlet to the great highway of nations, will
be all but irresistible.

III. And this brings me to a vital point, which Europeans have seemed
determined not to comprehend--that of the extremely artificial and
fragile character of the political structure which our architects of
national ruin are laboring to construct. Mr. Chancellor Gladstone is
pleased to favor us with his opinion that Slavery cannot long survive
the recognition and perfect establishment of the Southern Confederacy. I
beg leave to assure him, in turn, that the Confederacy would not long
survive the downfall of Slavery. Let Slavery fall, and a million of
bayonets could not keep the North and South disunited even twenty years.
Apart from Slavery and its fancied necessities, there is not a
Disunionist between New Brunswick and Mexico, Canada and Cuba. The Union
is the darling of our affections, the seal of our security, the
palladium of our strength. No American ever tolerated the idea of
disunion except as he intensely loved or ha