"Slavery agitation, in my opinion," says Abraham Lincoln, "will not cease until a crisis has been reached and passed. 'A house divided against itself cannot stand.'" We are now in the midst of that crisis. It is the pendency of that crisis which has prompted me to address you to-night. For the first time in the history of the government, we have the spectacle of purely sectional parties struggling for the control of the Federal government, each determined to warp and bend to its own sectional end, the Constitution and power of the Federal Union. Never before could patriotic citizens so earnestly lay to heart the counsel of Washington to avoid the formation of sectional parties. On the 17th of September, 1796, exactly nine years after he, as President of the Convention and Deputy from Virginia, had signed his name to the Federal Constitution, Washington thus addressed his fellow-citizens: "The unity of government which constitutes you one people is now dear to you. It is justly so; for it is a main pillar in the edifice of your real independence, the support of your tranquillity at home, your peace abroad, of your safety, of your prosperity, of that very liberty which you so highly prize. But as it is easy to foresee that from different causes and from different quarters, much pains will be taken, many artifices employed to weaken in your minds the conviction of this truth--as this is the point in your political fortress against which the batteries of internal and external enemies will be most constantly and actively (though often covertly and insidiously), directed, it is of infinite moment that you should properly estimate the immense value of your National Union to your collective and individual happiness; that you should cherish a cordial, habitual, and immovable attachment to it,--accustoming yourselves to think and speak of it as of the palladium of your political safety and prosperity; watching for its preservation with jealous anxiety; discountenancing whatever may suggest even a suspicion that it can in any event be abandoned; and indignantly frowning upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest, or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts." _Fellow-Citizens, the portentous evil which Washington thus deprecated in his Farewell Address to the people of the United States is now upon us. I repeat we are in the midst of the crisis of sectional parties. How shall it be passed, so that the Union shall not fall?_