glorious republic, this once national and confederated Union, which for nearly half a century has presented to the eyes, the hopes and the gratitude of man a more brilliant and lovely image than Plato or More or Harrington ever feigned or fancied, shall be like a tale that is told, like a vision that hath passed away. But these sentiments and feelings are necessarily weakened, and in the end must be destroyed, unless the moderate, the good, and the wise unite to "frown indignantly upon the first dawnings of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest, or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together its various parts." Threats of resistance, secession, separation have become common as household words in the wicked and silly violence of public declaimers. The public ear is familiarized with and the public mind will soon be accustomed to the detestable suggestion of _disunion_! Calculations and conjectures, what may the East do without the South, and what may the South do without the East, sneers, menaces, reproaches, and recriminations, all tend to the same fatal end! What can the East do without the South? What can the South do without the East? They may do much; they may exhibit to the curiosity of political anatomists, and the pity and wonder of the world the _disjecta membra_, the sundered, bleeding limbs of a once gigantic body instinct with life and strength and vigor. They can furnish to the philosophic historian another melancholy and striking instance of the political axiom that all republican confederacies have an inherent and unavoidable tendency to dissolution. They will present fields and occasion for border wars, for leagues and counter-leagues, for the intrigues of petty statesmen, the struggles of military chiefs, for confiscations, insurrections, and deeds of darkest hue. They will gladden the hearts of those who have proclaimed that men are not fit to govern themselves, and shed a disastrous eclipse on the hopes of rational freedom throughout the world. Solon in his code proposed no rational punishment for parricide, treating it as an impossible crime. Such with us ought to be the crime of political parricide--the dismemberment of our "fatherland." _Cari sunt parentes, cari liberi, propinqui, familiares; sed omnes omnium caritates patria una complexa est; pro qua quis bonus dubitet mortem oppetere, si ei sit profuturus? Quo est detestabilior istorum immanitas qui lacerarunt omni scelere patriam, et in ea funditus delenda occupati et sunt et fuerunt._