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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
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