But the battle is over, and we may now count the loss, and in the sequel see how effectually your blows have rebounded to the injury of all sections, both North and South. You have destroyed a million of our most valuable men, and imposed upon us a debt of three thousand millions of dollars—the heaviest burden, computing its interest at but six percent, while England’s draws but three, that now bears on any people in the known world. But even this, though great beyond indurance, for neither principal nor interest ever can be paid, is not the greatest of the afflictions which you have imposed upon us: you have destroyed the unity of sections, and killed our own goose that laid our golden eggs. This a few figures will effectually explain. Take for elucidation, of American commerce and production, any one year, when nature was unobstructed by the clash of arms, and it will unfold, not only the suicidal nature of your policy, but the great fountain out of which has flown American wealth and prosperity. Take, for example, the year 1859, the year preceding the tory rise and the American fall, and it will elucidate the point in question. The whole agricultural exports—the only reliable foundation of our national prosperity—of that year were, in round numbers, just $199,000,000, of that sum $161,000,000 was cotton, and $21,000,000 tobacco, leaving but $17,000,000 as the whole export of our cereals and provisions of that year. This whole sum of Northern exports would not now pay Ohio’s share of the interest on the national debt. How then is she to pay taxes and support life when the currency of the country, now blown into a froth, shall again have settled down to a solidity? She can not pay; nor can any other State not upheld by arbitrary laws, robbing other people for her benefit. In two years out of three, and probably three out of four, the Baltic and Black Sea, with their cereals and provisions, can undersell us in the markets of Western Europe, consequently a reliance on a direct trade of our northern productions with countries beyond our own, would be so uncertain as to leave us two years out of three, and probably three out of four, in a condition almost as helpless as if we had raised nothing above our own consumptive wants. Under such conditions one half of the Northwest would probably relapse into a wilderness—into that condition into which it would undoubtedly have remained had your policy began with the history of the nation. But our conditions have been of a very different character, and until disturbed by madmen, were, I have not a doubt, the best regulated for the production of national prosperity that any where existed upon the face of the world.