h the West can hold this essential
advantage, whether derived from its own separate strength or from an
apostate and unnatural connection with any foreign power, must be
intrinsically precarious.

While, then, every part of our country thus feels an immediate and
particular interest in union, all the parts combined can not fail to
find, in the united mass of means and efforts, greater strength, greater
resource, proportionably greater security from external danger, a less
frequent interruption of their peace by foreign nations, and, what is of
inestimable value, they must derive from union an exemption from those
broils and wars between themselves, which so frequently afflict
neighboring countries, not tied together by the same government, which
their own rivalships alone would be sufficient to produce, but which
opposite foreign alliances, attachments, and intrigues would stimulate
and embitter. Hence, likewise, they will avoid the necessity of those
over-grown 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 the 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 a 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 full and fair 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 a
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 tha