When Daniel Webster replied to Senator Hayne, of South Carolina, during
the exciting debate on the right of secession, he commenced his
ever-memorable speech with these words:

'When the mariner has been tossed for many days in thick weather
and on an unknown sea, he naturally avails himself of the first
pause in the storm--the earliest glance of the sun--to take his
latitude, and ascertain how far the elements have driven him from
his true course. Let us imitate this prudence before we float
farther, that we may at least be able to conjecture where we now
are.'

No words are fitter for our ears at this tumultuous period than are
these, when the passions of our countrymen, North and South, are excited
with the bitterest animosity, and when the discordant cries of party
faction at the North are threatening a desolation worse than that of
contending armies. In considering, then, our condition, it behooves us
first, to 'take our latitude, and ascertain where we now are,'--not as a
section or a party, but as a nation and a people. Let us avail ourselves
of that distant and dim glimmer in the heavens which even now is looked
upon by the sanguine as the promise of peace, and in its light survey
our dangers and nerve ourselves to our duties. We behold, then, a
people, bound together by the ties of a common interest, namely,
national prosperity and renown, and in possession of a land more favored
by natural elements of advantage than any other on the face of the
globe. We see them standing up in the ranks of hostile resistance each
to each, the one great and glorious army fighting for the restoration of
a nation once the envy of the world; the other great and glorious army
equally ardent and valorous in behalf of a separation of that territory
in which they are taught to believe we cannot hold together in peace and
amity. Both armies and people are evincing in their very warfare the
elements of character which heretofore distinguished us as a nation, and
are employing the very means for each other's destruction which were of
late the principles of action which rendered us in the highest degree a
nation worthy of respect at home and admiration abroad. It is not the
purpose of this paper to go back to causes or to relate the subsequent
events which have placed us where we are. These causes and events are
well known to us and to the world. But here we now stand, with this
fratricidal war increas