"It would be an act of suicide, and sane men do not commit suicide. The act itself is insanity. It will be done, if ever, in a fury and madness which cannot stop to reason. _Dissolution_ means death, the suicide of Liberty, without a hope of resurrection--death without the glories of immortality; with no sister to mourn her fall, none to wrap her decently in her winding-sheet and bear her tenderly to a sepulchre--_dead Liberty_, left to all the horrors of corruption, a loathsome thing, with a stake through the body, which men shun, cast out naked on the highway of nations, where the tyrants of the earth who feared her living will mock her dead, passing by on the other side, wagging their heads and thrusting their tongues in their cheeks at her, saying, 'Behold _her_ now, how _she_ that was fair among the nations is fallen! is fallen!'-- and only the few wise men who loved her out of every nation will shed tears over her desolation as they pass, and cast handfuls of earth on her body to quiet her manes, while we, her children, stumble about our ruined habitations to find dishonorable graves wherein to hide our shame. Dissolution? How shall it be? Who shall make it? Do men dream of Lot and Abraham parting, one to the east and the other to the west, peacefully, because their servants strive? That States will divide from States and boundary lines will be marked by compass and chain? Sir, that will be a portentous commission that shall settle that partition, for cannon will be planted at the corners and grinning skeletons be finger- posts to point the way. It will be no line gently marked on the bosom of the Republic--some meandering vein whence generations of her children have drawn their nourishment--but a sharp and jagged chasm, rending the hearts of commonwealths, lacerated and smeared with fraternal blood. On the night when the stars of her constellation shall fall from heaven the blackness of darkness forever will settle on the liberties of mankind in this Western World. _This is dissolution!_ If such, Sir, is _dissolution_ seen in a glass darkly, how terrible will it be face to face? They who reason about it are half crazy now. They who talk of it do not mean it, and dare not mean it. They who speak in earnest of a dissolution of this Union seem to me like children or madmen. He who would do such a deed as that would be the maniac without a tongue to tell his deed, or reason to arrest his steps--an instrument of mad impulse impelled by one idea to strike his victim. Sir, _there have been maniacs who have been cured by horror at the blood they have shed_."(130)