Mr. President, it cannot be--I will not believe it--nothing but demonstration, nothing but the accomplished fact shall satisfy me, that we have so degenerated from our sires of the Revolution as not to be able harmoniously to adjust the questions before us. It cannot be that the true spirit of concession and compromise has fled; that idealisms have taken the place of constitutional obligations and kindly feelings; that fanaticism has dethroned reason, and the Union, the work of our noble fathers, just as it has well commenced its onward progress to a future of real glory and power, is to be broken to pieces by the rude hands of agitation, by cabals abroad or intrigues at home, contrary to the general sentiment and earnest wish of the great mass of the people. Sir, we have had offerings made here for the preservation of this Union from every quarter of this chamber. Often and nobly have they been made by the distinguished Senator from Michigan [Mr. Cass]; firm, steady, constant, and true in this cause has my friend from New York, on the other side of the chamber [Mr. Dickinson], at all times been. The distinguished Senator from Kentucky [Mr. Clay], in his late earnest and patriotic efforts, has added another laurel to the immortal chaplet that binds his brow; and but a few days since, the great expounder of the Constitution [Mr. Webster], that man of mighty mental and moral power, closed the list of great names engaged in this holy cause, in a speech so clear in expression, so comprehensive in patriotism, so noble in self-devotion, that could we doubt the success of these united efforts for harmony and conciliation, we must needs believe that, for some inexpiable crime, God has visited us with judicial blindness, preparatory to the outpouring of his indignation upon our country. Sir, I will not believe this, I do not, I will not despair of a cause so good. On the contrary I trust that we shall yet come together on a common basis of harmonious cooperation, and find ourselves able to adopt, as the expression not only of a patriotic wish, but of an assured and confident hope, the sentiment made immortal by the great Senator from Massachusetts, "_Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable_." [Illustration: DAVID L. SWAIN.] DAVID L. SWAIN. BY Z. B. VANCE. That great range of mountains, extending from the St. Lawrence to the plains of Alabama, called by De Soto Appalachian, and by the Indian tribes, Alleghanies, which, in their tongue, signifies the endless, attains its greatest elevation in the Black Mountain group in the western part of this State.