And all these materials of combustion are now slumbering in our bosom, pent up a while, but ready to burst forth, like imprisoned lava, and deluge the land. How easy it would be to bring the nation into fierce contest on the subject of slavery, that internal cancer which inflames the whole body politic! How easy to array native citizens against foreign immigrants, who at once oppose the prejudices and diminish the wages of those around them! How easy to make one section believe that tariff, or tax, is sacrificing the prosperity of one portion to gratify the envy, or increase the luxuries of another! How easy to make one class of humbler means, believe that bank, or monopoly, is destroying the fruit of their toil, to increase the overgrown wealth of a class above them! And here is no standing army, such as is wielded by all other governments in sustaining law. When our communities are divided by interest or passion, the lawmakers, the judges, the jury, and the military are all partisans in the strife. Nor can one part of the Union suffer, and the other escape unharmed, as might be supposed, amid this reckless talk about the dissolution of the Union. An overt attempt to dissolve the Union is treason; and it can never be carried out without fierce parties in every state, ready to fight to the last gasp against such a suicidal act. Such a national dislocation would send a groan of agony through every city, town, and hamlet in our land; civil war would blow her trump, citizen would be arrayed against citizen, and state against state, and the whole arch of heaven would be inscribed with “mourning, and lamentation, and wo.” What, then, has saved our country from those wide-sweeping horrors that desolated France? Why is it that, in the excitements of embargoes, and banks, and slavery, and abolition, and foreign immigration, the besom of destruction has not swept over the land? It is because there has been such a large body of _educated_ citizens, who have had intelligence enough to understand how to administer the affairs of state, and a proper sense of the necessity of sustaining law and order; who have had moral principle enough to subdue their own passions, and to use their influence to control the excited minds of others. Change our large body of moral, intelligent, and religious people to the ignorant, impulsive, excitable population of France, and in one month the horrors of the Reign of Terror would be before our eyes. Nothing can preserve this nation from such scenes but perpetuating this preponderance of intelligence and virtue. This is our only safeguard.