There is another reason why we will not accept the destructive alternative demanded by the South. It is because we believe that by dismembering the Union and establishing two or more separate governments upon its ruins, _there can be no such thing as permanent peace_. We believe that if you cut the Mississippi in two by the border line of an alien nation, and deny the boundless wealth of the Mississippi Valley all access to the ocean, except under the frowning fortresses of a foreign power you cannot expect to have peace. We believe that to keep our rival systems of tariff and revenue from clashing, along a line extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific, without natural defences, through vast regions of wild and thinly populated territory, is an impossibility. And then there must be settled all the preliminaries of a dissolution――questions of boundary, questions of ownership of forts and public property――questions of division of the national debt, and of individual obligation――questions of river and harbor navigation; and then would arise, under forms vastly more difficult of adjustment all the old political questions that have alienated the sections; and then would come treaties and intrigues with foreign powers, and alliances entangling us with all the petty quarrels of Europe, and keeping us ever implacable enemies, thus rendering us impotent and without influence among nations. And _this_ is the future to which we are invited. Now we have _one_ cause of war; attempt to negotiate a dissolution of the Union, and we shall have _fifty_. And the number would be all the more, by reason of the parties with whom we should have to negotiate. For, I maintain that a set of men, who, like the leaders of this rebellion, would destroy a government like ours, upon pretexts such as theirs, could not be negotiated with, without war. And until their pride is humbled, their power broken, until they have been made to endure somewhat of the bitterness of that suffering they pour out so overwhelmingly upon others, until their arrogance and haughtiness are utterly abased in exile or on the scaffold, there can be no peace upon this continent. There is still another reason why we will not consent to the disruption of the Union. Because the probability is too great that it would end here, and in all the world, and for a thousand years the experiment of popular government. Already the South disdains the rule of the people. In a population of ten millions, they have but three hundred thousand slaveholders. Yet, almost every man in power is a slaveholder. Hence, government with them is already in the hands of a class. And then, the tone of their press, and the speeches of their statesmen have aimed for years to degrade labour, have betrayed a growing dislike for the equality of rights demanded by our institutions, and have been coloured with all the assumption and the arrogance of an aristocracy.