nt the silence and the quiet of the Sabbath day. Why is this? It
is because we, who have lived together in harmony with each other, a
powerful and a happy people, are breaking up--are preparing to
separate and go out from one another!

The merchants of our great commercial cities of Baltimore,
Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, are not listless or unenterprising
men. They are accustomed to the interests, the bustle, the excitement
of business. They have heretofore seen their stores crowded with
buyers. During the day the interiors of their places of business were
like busy hives. Not unfrequently have their clerks been obliged to
labor all through the night to secure and send off the goods which
they had sold to reliable customers during the day. When business is
good and driving throughout our commercial cities, wealth and comfort
are secured to merchants and agents engaged in commerce in those
cities, and it indicates general prosperity in the country to which
the goods purchased are transmitted. It shows a healthy condition of
affairs both in city and country.

How stands the matter in those cities to-day? Now, just when the
spring trade should be commencing, go to the extensive and magnificent
establishments for the sale of goods in any of the cities I have
named, where goods are sold which in prosperous times found their way
into almost every family to a greater or less amount in this great
country. What will you see in those cities now? The heavy stocks of
goods imported last autumn, or laid in from our own manufactories,
remain undisturbed and untouched upon the shelves. The customers are
not there--they have not made their appearance. The few who have come
at all, come not as buyers, but as debtors who cannot pay, and whose
business is not to make purchases but to arrange for extensions. The
merchants, in despair, are poring over their ledgers; checking off the
names of their insolvent debtors, a new list of whom comes by each
day's mail. Their clerks sit around in idleness reading the
newspapers, or thinking mournfully of the wives and children at home,
who will go unclad and hungry if they are discharged from their
places, as they know they must be, if this condition of things shall
continue. All alike, employers and employed, with all dependent upon
them, are looking anxiously, and I wish I could say hopefully, to the
Congress of the United States, or to this Conference, as the only
sources from which help