to property so sacred, a country which is more the common work of one people! And shall it now be allowed to a minority to take possession of a territory which belongs to all, and, moreover, to choose the best portion of it? Shall a minority be permitted to destroy the Union, and to imperil those who were its first benefactors, and without whom it would never have existed? If this does not constitute an impious revolt, then any whim that seizes a people is just and right. It is not only political reasons that oppose a separation; geography, the positions of places force the United States to form a single nation. Strabo, meditating on this vast country now called France, said, with the certainty of genius, that, to look at the nature of the territory, and the course of the waters, it was evident that the forests of Gaul, inhabited by a thinly scattered people, would become the abode of a great people. Nature has disposed our territory to be the theatre of a great civilization. This is also true of America, which is really but a double valley, whose place of separation is imperceptible, and which contains two large water courses, the Mississippi, and the St. Lawrence. There are no high mountains which isolate and separate the people, no natural barriers like the Alps and Pyrenees. The West cannot live without the Mississippi; it is a question of life and death to the Western farmers to hold the mouth of the river. The United States felt this from the first day of their existence. When the Ohio and Mississippi were yet but streams lost in the forest, when the first planters were only a handful of men scattered in the wilderness, the Americans already knew that New Orleans was _the key of the house_. They would not leave it either to Spain or France. Napoleon understood this; he held in his hands the future greatness of the United States; he was glad to cede this vast territory to America, with the intention, he said, 'to give to England a maritime rival which sooner or later would lower the pride of our enemies.' (Here the author refers to his pamphlet, entitled, _Les Etats Unis et la France_, and to _L'histoire de la Louisiane_, by Barbé Marbois.) He could have satisfied the United States by only giving up the left bank of the river, which was all they asked for then; he did more (and in this I think he was very wrong), with a stroke of his pen he ceded a country as large as the half of Europe, and renounced our last rights on this beautiful river which we had discovered. Sixty years have quickly passed since this cession. The States which are now called Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, Kansas, Oregon, and the territories of Nebraska, Dacotah, Jefferson and Washington, which will soon become States, have been established on the immense domain abandoned by Napoleon. Without counting the slaveholding population which wishes to break up the Union, there are ten millions of free citizens between Pittsburg and Fort