as been
injurious or fatal to your interests? Has it paralyzed your industry?
Has it crippled your resources? Has it impaired your energies? Has
it checked your progress in any one department of human effort? Let
your powerful mercantile marine, your ships whitening every sea--the
fruit of wise commercial regulations and navigation laws; let your
flourishing agriculture, your astonishing progress in manufacturing
skill, your great canals, your thousands of miles of railroads, your
vast trade, internal and external, your proud cities, and your
accumulated millions of moneyed capital, ready to be invested in
profitable enterprises in any part of the world, answer that question.
Do you complain of a narrow and jealous policy under Southern rule, in
extending and opening new fields of enterprise to your hardy sons in
the great West, along the line of the great chain of American lakes,
even to the head waters of the Father of Rivers, and over the rich and
fertile plains stretching southward from the lake shores? Let the
teeming populations--let the hundreds of millions of annual products
that have succeeded to the but recent dreary and unproductive haunts
of the red man--answer that question. That very preponderance of
free States which the Senator from New York contemplates with such
satisfaction, and which has moved him exultingly to exclaim that
there is at last a North side of this Chamber, has been hastened by
the liberal policy of Southern Presidents and Southern statesmen; and
has it become the ambition of that Senator to unite and combine all
this great, rich, and powerful North in the policy of crippling the
resources and repressing the power of the South? Is this to be the
one idea which is to mold the policy of the government, when that
gentleman and his friends shall control it? If it be, then I appeal
to the better feelings and the better judgment of his followers to
arrest him in his mad career. Sir, let us have some brief interval of
repose at least from this eternal agitation of the slavery question.
Let power go into whatever hands it may, let us save the Union!

I have all the confidence other gentlemen can have in the extent to
which this Union is intrenched in the hearts of the great mass of
the people of the North and South; but when I reflect upon and
consider the desperate and dangerous extremes to which ambitious
party leaders are often prepared to go, without meaning to do the
country any m