f great gratitude to
God for unusual good health and abundant harvests.

You will not be surprised to learn that in the peculiar exigencies of
the times, our intercourse with foreign nations has been attended with
profound solicitude, chiefly turning upon our own domestic affairs.

A disloyal portion of the American people have, during the whole year,
been engaged in an attempt to divide and destroy the Union. A nation
which endures factious domestic division is exposed to disrespect
abroad; and one party, if not both, is sure, sooner or later, to invoke
foreign intervention. Nations thus tempted to interfere are not always
able to resist the counsels of seeming expediency and ungenerous
ambition, although measures adopted under such influences seldom fail to
be injurious and unfortunate to those adopting them.

The disloyal citizens of the United States who have offered the ruin of
our country in return for the aid and comfort which they have invoked
abroad, have received less patronage and encouragement than they
probably expected. If it were just to suppose, as the insurgents have
seemed to assume, that foreign nations in this case, discarding all
moral, social, and treaty obligations, would act solely and selfishly
for the most speedy restoration of commerce, including especially the
acquisition of cotton, those nations appear as yet not to have seen
their way to their object more directly or clearly through the
destruction than through the preservation of the Union. If we could dare
to believe that foreign nations are actuated by no higher principle than
this, I am quite sure a sound argument could be made to show them that
they can reach their aim more readily and easily by aiding to crush
this rebellion than by giving encouragement to it.

The principal lever relied on by the insurgents for exciting foreign
nations to hostility against us, as already intimated, is the
embarrassment of commerce. Those nations, however, not improbably saw
from the first that it was the Union which made as well our foreign as
our domestic commerce. They can scarcely have failed to perceive that
the effort for disunion produces the existing difficulty; and that one
strong nation promises a more durable peace and a more extensive,
valuable, and reliable commerce than can the same nation broken into
hostile fragments.

* * * * *

It continues to develop that the insurrection is largely, if not
excl