Sir, should a civil war ensue between the north and the south, (which may God in his mercy avert,) in consequence of an attempt to dissolve this Union, and the certain resistance which would be made to such an attempt, it would be difficult to exaggerate the immediate evils which would befall the interests of New England and some other parts of the north. Our manufactures and our commerce would suffer at least a temporary derangement. But we have boundless resources in our enterprise and our intelligence. Knowledge and industry are recuperative energies that can never long be balked in their quest of prosperity. The people that bore the embargo of 1807, and the war of 1812, when all their capital was embarked in commerce, can survive any change that does not stop the revolution of the seasons or suspend the great laws of nature. And, when the day of peace again returns, business will again return to its old channels. The south, notwithstanding any personal hostility, will be as ready to take northern gold as though it had come from the English mint; and they will employ those first, who will do their manufacturing or their commercial labor cheapest and best. Gold is a great pacificator between nations; and, in this money-loving age, mutual interests will, in the end, subdue mutual hostilities. Our share, therefore, of the calamities of a civil war, will be mainly of a pecuniary nature. They will not be intolerable. They will invade none of the securities of home; they will not associate poison with our daily food, nor murder and conflagration with our nightly repose; nor black violation with the sanctities of our daughters and our wives. Even in a pecuniary point of view, a dissolution of our political ties would cause less immediate and intense suffering at the north than at the south. Our laws and institutions are all framed so as to encourage the poor man, and, by education, to elevate his children above the condition of their parents; but their laws and institutions all tend to aggrandize the rich, and to perpetuate power in their hands. Were it not for the visions of horror and of bloodshed which southern threats have so intimately associated with this controversy, one remarkable feature, which has hitherto been eclipsed, would have been most conspicuous.