To show the dangerous reciprocity of feeling between old and New England long before it was intensified as it now is by the community of interest in untold millions of investments, the words uttered by John Quincy Adams, the sixth President of the United States, fall with the weight of state's evidence: "That their object (_i. e._ that of the New England States) was, and had been for several years, a dissolution of the Union and the establishment of a separate confederation, he knew from unequivocal evidence, although not provable in a court of law; and that in case of a civil war the aid of Great Britain to effect that purpose would as assuredly be resorted to as it would be indispensably necessary to their design."--_Adams' letter in reply to Harrison Gray Otis and others_, December 28, 1828, quoted by Raphael Semmes in his _Memoirs of Service Afloat_, p. 43. This attachment to British interests was so pronounced in 1812 that the New England States refused to furnish their quota of troops to help conduct our defense; and, while the nation was locked in deadly conflict with the ruthless invader, these States actually held a convention at Hartford looking to secession. The Governor of Massachusetts proclaimed a public fast day for deploring a war against a nation which had long been "the bulwark of the religion we profess"; its Supreme Court decided that neither the President nor Congress could control its State troops in time of war, and the Legislature declared the war to be unholy, and urged its people to do what they could to thwart it. These States forced a treaty of peace in which Great Britain was not even required to cease the outrages on account of which the war was undertaken--outrages which might have been begun again but for Jackson's victory with the Southern soldiers at New Orleans. Jefferson, in a letter to Lafayette, says: "During that war four of the Eastern States were only attached to the Union like so many inanimate bodies to living men." That will be the saddest chapter of American history which faithfully compares the treasonable obstruction of these States to this war with their Cain-like swiftness to shed their brothers' blood because of an alleged difference of opinion on a question of constitutional law. It will be remembered, in this connection, that these States had their troops mobilized and waiting for the President's call before Fort Sumter was fired on. In four days after the call the troops of Massachusetts (the most protected State save one) had invaded the State of Maryland and were shooting down the astonished and outraged citizens of Baltimore.