Break up our Union and you mar all our history. You write all backward the lessons of our country’s glory that we have learned from earliest childhood. You take from us the only object we had learned to regard with patriotic fervour. It is like taking from one’s home the only being that gives it life and loveliness. It is like blotting the sun from the heavens. It is taking from us, at a single stroke, what men, in all ages of the world, have fought for with the most undaunted courage, what no nation on the globe to-day, civilized or not, would ever think of yielding without first risking annihilation. No; we are satisfied with the Union that our Fathers founded. We are satisfied with the eighty years experience by which it has been tested. We are satisfied with the place it has taken among the nations. We want no new experiments in Government. Especially do we want none initiated upon the fragments of our own. We know that to the Union we owe all our progress and our power, all that we have, all that we are, all that we can hope to be. We know that it is the flag of our Union that is recognized on every sea and honoured throughout the world. We know that our little, petty, pompous States sink into insignificance when we leave their soil, and that it is the name of an _American citizen_ that we prize at home, and that gives us character abroad. It is not “the rocky hills and stone-clad valleys” of New England, nor the rich soil and undulating surface of the Middle States with their great wealth-bearing mountain ranges, nor the fertile prairies of the West, nor the broad savannas of the South, it is no one of these, but all in one that we have learned to call our country. It is not Adams and Hamilton and Harrison and Webster alone, but Washington and Henry and Jackson and Clay that we have learned to venerate among our heroes and Statesmen. It is not the battle-fields of New England and the Middle States alone, but of Virginia and the Carolinas that make up the glory of our Nationality. It is impossible to blot these names from our history. It is impossible to erase these memories from our hearts. And it is impossible to educate a people, with such an ancestry, in such annals, and have them enjoy the blessings of such a government for the larger part of a hundred years, and then undertake to break up their government, either by domestic or by foreign foes, without creating a convulsion that will shake the world.