4. To these “unities,” derived from history and the heart of the people, may be added another, where Nature is the great teacher. I refer to the geographical position and configuration of our country, if not of the whole continent, marking it for one nation. Unity is written upon it by the Almighty hand. In this respect it differs much from Europe, where, for generations, seas, rivers, and mountains kept people apart, who had else, “like kindred drops, been mingled into one.” There is no reason why they should not commingle here. Nature in every form is propitious. Facility of intercourse, not less than common advantage, leads to unity: both these are ours. Here are navigable rivers, numerous and famous, being so many highways of travel, and a chain of lakes, each an inland sea. Then there is an unexampled extent of country adapted to railways; and do not forget that with the railway is the telegraph, using the lightning as its messenger, so that the interrogatory to Job is answered, “Canst thou send lightnings that they may go?”[73] The country is one open expanse, from the frozen Arctic to the warm waters of the Gulf, and from the Atlantic to the Rocky Mountains,--and there already science supplies the means of overcoming this barrier, which in other days would have marked international boundaries. The Pacific Railway will neutralize these mountains, and complete the geographical unity of the continent. The slender wire of the telegraph, when once extended, is an indissoluble tie; the railway is an iron band. But these depend upon opportunities which Nature supplies, so that Nature herself is one of the guardians of our nation. He has studied history poorly, and human nature no better, who imagines that this broad compacted country can be parcelled into different nationalities. Where will you run the thread of partition? By what river? Along what mountain? On what line of latitude or longitude? Impossible. No line of longitude or latitude, no mountain, no river, can become the demarcation. Every State has rights in every other State. The whole country has a title, which it will never renounce, in every part, whether the voluminous Mississippi as it pours to the sea, or that same sea as it chafes upon our coast. As well might we of the East attempt to shut you of the West from the ocean as you attempt to shut us from the Mississippi. The ocean will always be yours as it is ours, and the Mississippi will always be ours as it is yours.