Great, however, as would be the effect of these works in augmenting our commerce, wealth, and population, their results in consolidating and perpetuating our Union would be still more important. When the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri, and all their tributaries, arterializing the great valley, shall be united by the proposed routes with the lakes, the St. Lawrence, the Hudson, Delaware, Susquehanna, Chesapeake, and Albemarle, what sacrilegious hand could be raised against such a Union? We should have no more rebellions. We should hear no more of North, South, East, and West, for all would be linked together by a unity of commerce and interests. Our Union would become a social, moral, geographical, political, and commercial necessity, and no State would risk by secession the benefit of participating in its commerce. We should be a homogeneous people, and slavery would disappear before the march of civilization, and of free schools, free labor, free soil, free lakes, rivers, and canals. It is the absence of such a system (aided by slavery), _drawing the West and Southwest, by a supposed superior attraction, to the Gulf_, that has led the Southwest into this rebellion. But with slavery extinguished, with freedom strengthening labor's hand, with education elevating the soul and enlightening the understanding, and with such communications uniting all our great lakes and rivers, East and West, all crowned with nourishing towns and mighty cities, with cultured fields and smiling harvests, exchanging their own products and fabrics, and those of the world, by flying cars and rushing steamers, revolt or disunion would be impossible. Strike down every barrier that separates the business of the North and East from that of the South and West, and you render dissolution impossible. In commerce, we would be a unit, drawing to us, by the irresistible attraction of interest, intercourse, and trade, the whole valley of the lakes and St. Lawrence. Whom God had united by geography, by race, by language, commerce, and interest, political institutions could not long keep asunder. Of all foreign nations, those which would derive the greatest advantages from such an union would be England and France, the two governments which a wicked pro-slavery rebellion invites to attempt our destruction. With such a commerce, and with slavery extinguished, we would have the Union, not as it was, but as our fathers intended it should be, when they founded this great and free republic. We should soon attain the highest civilization, and enjoy the greatest happiness of which our race is capable. So long as slavery existed here, and we were divided into States cherishing, and States abhorring the institution, so long as free and forced labor were thus antagonized, we could scarcely be said to have a real Union, or to exist truly as a nation. Slavery loomed up like a black mountain, dividing us. Slavery kept us always on the verge of civil war, with hostility to liberty,