These considerations speak a persuasive language to every reflecting and virtuous mind, and exhibit the continuance of the union as a primary object of patriotic desire.  Is there a doubt whether a common government can embrace so large a sphere?  Let experience solve it.  To listen to mere speculation in such a case were criminal.  We are authorized to hope that a proper organization of the whole, with the auxiliary agency of governments for the respective subdivisions, will afford a happy issue to the experiment.  It is well worth a fair and full experiment.  With such powerful and obvious motives to union affecting all parts of our country, while experience shall not have demonstrated its impracticability, there will always be reason to distrust the patriotism of those who in any quarter may endeavor to weaken its bands.

In contemplating the causes which may disturb our union it occurs as matter of serious concern that any ground should have been furnished for characterizing parties by geographical discriminations—­Northern and Southern, Atlantic and Western—­whence designing men may endeavor to excite a belief that there is a real difference of local interests and views, One of the expedients of party to acquire influence within particular districts is to misrepresent the opinions and aims of other districts.  You can not shield yourselves too much against the jealousies and heartburnings which spring from these misrepresentations; they tend to render alien to each other those who ought to be bound together by fraternal affection.  The inhabitants of our Western country have lately had a useful lesson on this head.  They have seen in the negotiation by the Executive and in the unanimous ratification by the Senate of the treaty with Spain, and in the universal satisfaction at that event throughout the United States, a decisive proof how unfounded were the suspicions propagated among them of a policy in the General Government and in the Atlantic States unfriendly to their interests in regard to the Mississippi.  They have been witnesses to the formation of two treaties—­that with Great Britain and that with Spain—­which secure to them everything they could desire in respect to our foreign relations toward confirming their prosperity.  Will it not be their wisdom to rely for the preservation of these advantages on the union by which they were procured?  Will they not henceforth be deaf to those advisers, if such there are, who would sever them from their brethren and connect them with aliens?

To the efficacy and permanency of your union a government for the whole is indispensable.  No alliances, however strict, between the parts can be an adequate substitute.  They must inevitably experience the infractions and interruptions which all alliances in all times have experienced.  Sensible of this momentous truth, you have improved upon your first essay by the adoption of a Constitution of Government