people that is deep and enduring, and you never
can eradicate it--never! Look at the spectacle exhibited on this floor.
How is it? There are the Republican Northern Senators upon that side.
Here are the Southern Senators on this side. How much social intercourse
is there between us? You sit upon your side, silent and gloomy; we sit
upon ours with knit brows and portentous scowls. Yesterday I observed
that there was not a solitary man on that side of the Chamber came over
here even to extend the civilities and courtesies of life; nor did any
of us go over there. Here are two hostile bodies on this floor; and it
is but a type of the feeling that exists between the two sections. We
are enemies as much as if we were hostile States. I believe that the
Northern people hate the South worse than ever the English people hated
France; and I can tell my brethren over there that there is no love lost
upon the part of the South.

In this state of feeling, divided as we are by interest, by a
geographical feeling, by every thing that makes two people separate and
distinct, I ask why we should remain in the same Union together? We have
not lived in peace; we are not now living in peace. It is not expected
or hoped that we shall ever live in peace. My doctrine is that whenever
even man and wife find that they must quarrel, and cannot live in
peace, they ought to separate; and these two sections--the North and
South--manifesting, as they have done and do now, and probably will ever
manifest, feelings of hostility, separated as they are in interests and
objects, my own opinion is they can never live in peace; and the sooner
they separate the better.

Sir, these sentiments I have thrown out crudely I confess, and upon the
spur of the occasion. I should not have opened my mouth but that the
Senator from New Hampshire seemed to show a spirit of bravado, as if
he intended to alarm and scare the Southern States into a retreat from
their movements. He says that war is to come, and you had better take
care, therefore. That is the purport of his language; of course those
are not his words; but I understand him very well, and everybody else,
I apprehend, understands him that war is threatened, and therefore the
South had better look out. Sir, I do not believe that there will be any
war; but if war is to come, let it come. We will meet the Senator
from New Hampshire and all the myrmidons of Abolitionism and Black
Republicanism everywhere, upon our