mselves, and then levy taxes on us without our consent, and
collect revenues without giving us any just proportion or any
portion of the amount collected. Can we submit to taxation without
representation? Can we permit nations foreign to us to collect
revenues off our products, the fruits of our industry? I ask the
citizens of Illinois--I ask every citizen in the great basin between
the Rocky Mountains and the Alleghenies, in the valley of the Ohio,
Mississippi, and Missouri to tell me whether he is willing to
sanction a line of policy that may isolate us from the markets of
the world and make us dependent provinces upon powers that thus
choose to surround and hem us in?

"I warn you, my countrymen, whenever you permit this to be done in
the Southern States, New York will very soon follow their example.
New York--that great port where two-thirds of all our revenue is
collected, and whence two-thirds of our products are exported, will
not long be able to resist the temptation of taxing fifteen millions
of people in the great West, when she can monopolize the resources
and release her own people thereby from any taxation whatsoever.
Hence I say to you, my countrymen, from the best consideration I
have been able to give to this subject, after the most mature
reflection and thorough investigation, I have arrived at the
conclusion that, come what may,--war if it must be, although I
deplore it as a great calamity,--yet, come what may, the people of
the Mississippi Valley can never consent to be excluded from free
access to the ports of the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Gulf of
Mexico.

"Hence, I repeat, that while I am not prepared to take up arms or
to sanction war upon the rights of the Southern States, upon their
domestic institutions, upon their rights of person or property,
but, on the contrary, would rush to their defence and protect them
from assault, I will never cease to urge my countrymen to take up
arms and to fight to the death in defence of our indefeasible
rights.

"Hence, if a war does come, it will be a war of self-defence on
our part. It will be a war in defence of our own just rights; in
defence of the Government which we have inherited as a priceless
legacy from our patriotic fathers; in defence of those great rights
of the freedom of trade, commerce, transit, and intercourse from
the centre to the circumference of our great continent. These are
rights we can never surrender.

"I have struggled