ity of
commerce and interests. Our Union would become a social, moral,
geographical, political, and commercial necessity, and no State would
risk by secession the benefit of participating in its commerce. We
should be a homogeneous people, and slavery would disappear before the
march of civilization, and of free schools, free labor, free soil, free
lakes, rivers, and canals. It is the absence of such a system (aided by
slavery), _drawing the West and Southwest, by a supposed superior
attraction, to the Gulf_, that has led the Southwest into this
rebellion. But with slavery extinguished, with freedom strengthening
labor's hand, with education elevating the soul and enlightening the
understanding, and with such communications uniting all our great lakes
and rivers, East and West, all crowned with nourishing towns and mighty
cities, with cultured fields and smiling harvests, exchanging their own
products and fabrics, and those of the world, by flying cars and rushing
steamers, revolt or disunion would be impossible. Strike down every
barrier that separates the business of the North and East from that of
the South and West, and you render dissolution impossible. In commerce,
we would be a unit, drawing to us, by the irresistible attraction of
interest, intercourse, and trade, the whole valley of the lakes and St.
Lawrence. Whom God had united by geography, by race, by language,
commerce, and interest, political institutions could not long keep
asunder. Of all foreign nations, those which would derive the greatest
advantages from such an union would be England and France, the two
governments which a wicked pro-slavery rebellion invites to attempt our
destruction. With such a commerce, and with slavery extinguished, we
would have the Union, not as it was, but as our fathers intended it
should be, when they founded this great and free republic. We should
soon attain the highest civilization, and enjoy the greatest happiness
of which our race is capable. So long as slavery existed here, and we
were divided into States cherishing, and States abhorring the
institution, so long as free and forced labor were thus antagonized, we
could scarcely be said to have a real Union, or to exist truly as a
nation. Slavery loomed up like a black mountain, dividing us. Slavery
kept us always on the verge of civil war, with hostility to liberty,
education, and progress, and menacing for half a century the life of the
republic. The question then w