This address made a profound impression, voicing as it did the general public feeling in New Hampshire on the subjects of which it treated. It led to an assembly of the people of Rockingham County a few weeks later, called to prepare a memorial to the President protesting against the war. To this convention Mr. Webster was appointed a delegate, and it was he who was selected to draft what has been since known as the “Rockingham Memorial.” One of the most noteworthy passages in this memorial—noteworthy because it is an early expression of his devotion to the Union—I find quoted by Mr. Curtis, and I shall follow his lead in transferring it to my pages. “We are, sir, from principle and habit attached to the Union of these States. But our attachment is to the substance, and not to the form. It is to the good which this Union is capable of producing, and not to the evil which is suffered unnaturally to grow out of it. If the time should ever arrive when this Union shall be holden together by nothing but the authority of law; when its incorporating, vital principles shall become extinct; when its principal exercises shall consist in acts of power and authority, not of protection and beneficence; when it shall lose the strong bond which it hath hitherto had in the public affections; and when, consequently, we shall be one, not in interest and mutual regard, but in name and form only—we, sir, shall look on that hour as the closing scene of our country’s prosperity. “We shrink from the separation of the States as an event fraught with incalculable evils, and it is among our strongest objections to the present course of measures that they have, in our opinion, a very dangerous and alarming bearing on such an event. If a separation of the States ever should take place, it will be on some occasion when one portion of the country undertakes to control, to regulate and to sacrifice the interest of another; when a small and heated majority in the Government, taking counsel of their passions, and not of their reason, contemptuously disregarding the interests and perhaps stopping the mouths of a large and respectable minority, shall by hasty, rash and ruinious measures, threaten to destroy essential rights, and lay waste the most important interests. “It shall be our most fervent supplication to Heaven to avert both the event and the occasion; and the Government may be assured that the tie that binds us to the Union will never be broken by us.” Even my young readers will be struck by the judicial calmness, the utter absence of heated partisanship, which mark the extracts I have made, and they will recall the passage well known to every schoolboy—the grand closing passage of the reply to Hayne.