our Government. That confidence can only be
retained by carefully inculcating the principles of justice and honor
on the popular mind and by the most scrupulous fidelity to all our
engagements of every sort. Any serious breach of the organic law,
persisted in for a considerable time, can not but create fears for the
stability of our institutions. Habitual violation of prescribed rules,
which we bind ourselves to observe, must demoralize the people. Our only
standard of civil duty being set at naught, the sheet anchor of our
political morality is lost, the public conscience swings from its
moorings and yields to every impulse of passion and interest. If we
repudiate the Constitution, we will not be expected to care much for
mere pecuniary obligations. The violation of such a pledge as we made on
the 22d day of July, 1861, will assuredly diminish the market value of
our other promises. Besides, if we acknowledge that the national debt
was created, not to hold the States in the Union, as the taxpayers were
led to suppose, but to expel them from it and hand them over to be
governed by negroes, the moral duty to pay it may seem much less clear.
I say it may _seem_ so, for I do not admit that this or any other
argument in favor of repudiation can be entertained as sound; but
its influence on some classes of minds may well be apprehended. The
financial honor of a great commercial nation, largely indebted and with
a republican form of government administered by agents of the popular
choice, is a thing of such delicate texture and the destruction of it
would be followed by such unspeakable calamity that every true patriot
must desire to avoid whatever might expose it to the slightest danger.

The great interests of the country require immediate relief from these
enactments. Business in the South is paralyzed by a sense of general
insecurity, by the terror of confiscation, and the dread of negro
supremacy. The Southern trade, from which the North would have derived
so great a profit under a government of law, still languishes, and can
never be revived until it ceases to be fettered by the arbitrary power
which makes all its operations unsafe. That rich country--the richest in
natural resources the world ever saw--is worse than lost if it be not
soon placed under the protection of a free constitution. Instead of
being, as it ought to be, a source of wealth and power, it will become
an intolerable burden upon the rest of the nation