melancholy future must confront St. Louis,
separated by national barriers from Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Colorado,
Nebraska, and all the vast, undeveloped sources of her present as well
as prospective commerce and greatness! Ponder the madness of Baltimore,
seeking separation from that active and teeming West to which she has
laid an iron track over the Alleghanies at so heavy a cost! But for
Slavery, the Southron who should gravely propose disunion, would at once
be immured in a receptacle for lunatics. He would find no sympathy
elsewhere.

But a nobler idea, a truer conception, of National Unity, is rapidly
gaining possession of the American mind. It is that dimly foreshadowed
by our President when, in his discussions with Senator Douglas, he said:
'I do not think our country can endure half slave and half free. I do
not think it will be divided, but I think it will become all one or the
other.'

'A union of lakes, a union of lands,' is well; but a true 'union of
hearts' must be based on a substantial identity of social habitudes and
moral convictions. If Islamism or Mormonism were the accepted religion
of the South, and we were expected to bow to and render at least outward
deference to it, there would doubtless be thousands of Northern-born men
who, for the sake of office, or trade, or in the hope of marrying
Southern plantations, would profess the most unbounded faith in the
creed of the planters, and would crowd their favorite temples located on
our own soil. But this would not be a real bond of union between us, but
merely an exhibition of servility and fawning hypocrisy. And so the
Northern complaisance toward slavery has in no degree tended to avert
the disaster which has overtaken us, but only to breed self-reproach on
the one side, and hauteur with ineffable loathing on the other.

Hereafter National Unity is to be no roseate fiction, no gainful
pretense, but a living reality. The United States of the future will be
no constrained alliance of discordant and mutually repellent
commonwealths, but a true exemplification of 'many in one'--many stars
blended in one common flag--many States combined in one homogeneous
Nation. Our Union will be one of bodies not merely, but of souls. The
merchant of Boston or New-York will visit Richmond or Louisville for
tobacco, Charleston for rice, Mobile for cotton, New-Orleans for sugar,
without being required at every hospitable board, in every friendly
circle, to repudiate