e
Constitution and laws of their country, and to point out to all the
perilous situation into which the good people of that State have been
led, and that the course they are urged to pursue is one of ruin and
disgrace to the very State whose rights they effect to support.

Fellow-citizens of my native State! let me not only admonish you, as the
first magistrate of our common country, not to incur the penalty of its
laws, but use the influence that a father would over his children whom
he saw rushing to a certain ruin. In that paternal language, with that
paternal feeling, let me tell you, my countrymen, that you are deluded
by men who are either deceived themselves or wish to deceive you. Mark
under what pretenses you have been led on to the brink of insurrection
and treason on which you stand! First a diminution of the value of our
staple commodity, lowered by over-production in other quarters and the
consequent diminution in the value of your lands, were the sole effect
of the tariff laws. The effect of those laws was confessedly injurious,
but the evil was greatly exaggerated by the unfounded theory you were
taught to believe, that its burdens were in proportion to your exports,
not to your consumption of imported articles. Your pride was roused by
the assertions that a submission to these laws was a state of vassalage,
and that resistance to them was equal, in patriotic merit, to the
opposition our fathers offered to the oppressive laws of Great Britain.
You were told that this opposition might be peaceably--might be
constitutionally made--that you might enjoy all the advantages of the
Union and bear none of its burdens. Eloquent appeals to your passions,
to your State pride, to your native courage, to your sense of real
injury, were used to prepare you for the period when the mask which
concealed the hideous features of DISUNION should be taken off. It fell,
and you were made to look with complacency on objects which not long
since you would have regarded with horror. Look back to the arts which
have brought you to this state--look forward to the consequences to
which it must inevitably lead! Look back to what was first told you as
an inducement to enter into this dangerous course. The great political
truth was repeated to you that you had the revolutionary right of
resisting all laws that were palpably unconstitutional and intolerably
oppressive--it was added that the right to nullify a law rested on the
same prin