"If these States should either be wholly disunited, or only united in partial confederacies, a man must be far gone in utopian speculation who can seriously doubt that the subdivisions into which they might be thrown would have frequent and violent contests with each other. To presume a want of motives for such contests, as an argument against their existence, would be to forget that men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious. To look for a continuation of harmony between a number of independent, unconnected sovereignties, situated in the same neighborhood, would be to disregard the uniform course of human events, and to set at defiance the accumulated experience of ages." If this was a just view of the probable--the certain--results of a separation of these States at that time, and under the then existing circumstances, I pray you, sir, upon what, at the present day, can we found a better hope? Then the States were fresh from the conflict of the Revolutionary war. Then, not only had they a lively remembrance of the contest in which they had fought and in which they had gathered victory and honor together, but the leading men of that time were those choice spirits who had carried them through that recent conflict, who had established the independence of the country, and who exercised an influence in public affairs proportioned to their patriotism, their valor and their wisdom. Then they might have separated without the same causes of hostility and alienation which must exist in any separation of these States at the present day. If we separate now, we do it with feelings of mutual distrust and bitterness. We divide, not by common consent, as partners who can no longer carry on their joint business with mutual profit, each to pursue, for his own separate advantage, that course of business in which he thinks he can best succeed, but we part with the feelings of those who consider themselves mutually wronged. A sense of injustice and oppression rankles in the hearts of one portion of the new confederacies, and a sense in the other of defiance and indignity. Under such circumstances, "what can ensue" (to borrow the language of the great English moralist) "but a continual exacerbation of hatred, an unextinguishable feud, an incessant reciprocation of mischief, a mutual vigilance to entrap and eagerness to destroy?"