n alliances, attachments, and intrigues would stimulate
and imbitter. Hence, likewise, they will avoid the necessity of those
overgrown military establishments which, under any form of government,
are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as
particularly hostile to republican liberty. In this sense it is that
your union ought to be considered as a main prop of your liberty, and
that the love of the one ought to endear to you the preservation of
the other.

These considerations speak a persuasive language to every reflecting
and virtuous mind, and exhibit the continuance of the union as a
primary object of patriotic desire. Is there a doubt whether a common
government can embrace so large a sphere? Let experience solve it.
To listen to mere speculation in such a case were criminal. We are
authorized to hope that a proper organization of the whole, with the
auxiliary agency of governments for the respective subdivisions, will
afford a happy issue to the experiment. It is well worth a fair and full
experiment. With such powerful and obvious motives to union affecting
all parts of our country, while experience shall not have demonstrated
its impracticability, there will always be reason to distrust the
patriotism of those who in any quarter may endeavor to weaken
its bands.

In contemplating the causes which may disturb our union it occurs as
matter of serious concern that any ground should have been furnished for
characterizing parties by _geographical_ discriminations--_Northern_ and
_Southern, Atlantic_ and _Western_--whence designing men may endeavor
to excite a belief that there is a real difference of local interests
and views, One of the expedients of party to acquire influence within
particular districts is to misrepresent the opinions and aims of other
districts. You can not shield yourselves too much against the jealousies
and heartburnings which spring from these misrepresentations; they tend
to render alien to each other those who ought to be bound together by
fraternal affection. The inhabitants of our Western country have lately
had a useful lesson on this head. They have seen in the negotiation by
the Executive and in the unanimous ratification by the Senate of the
treaty with Spain, and in the universal satisfaction at that event
throughout the United States, a decisive proof how unfounded were the
suspicions propagated among them of a policy in the General Government
and in the Atlantic St