And now, Mr. President, what is the reason for passing laws like these?  What are the oppressions experienced under the Union, calling for measures which thus threaten to sever and destroy it?  What invasions of public liberty, what ruin to private happiness, what long list of rights violated, or wrongs unredressed, is to justify to the country, to posterity, and to the world, this assault upon the free Constitution of the United States, this great and glorious work of our fathers?  At this very moment, Sir, the whole land smiles in peace, and rejoices in plenty.  A general and a high prosperity pervades the country; and, judging by the common standard, by increase of population and wealth, or judging by the opinions of that portion of her people not embarked in these dangerous and desperate measures, this prosperity overspreads South Carolina herself.

Thus happy at home, our country, at the same time, holds high the character of her institutions, her power, her rapid growth, and her future destiny, in the eyes of all foreign states.  One danger only creates hesitation; one doubt only exists, to darken the otherwise unclouded brightness of that aspect which she exhibits to the view and to the admiration of the world.  Need I say, that that doubt respects the permanency of our Union? and need I say, that that doubt is now caused, more than any thing else, by these very proceedings of South Carolina?  Sir, all Europe is, at this moment, beholding us, and looking for the issue of this controversy; those who hate free institutions, with malignant hope; those who love them, with deep anxiety and shivering fear.

The cause, then, Sir, the cause!  Let the world know the cause which has thus induced one State of the Union to bid defiance to the power of the whole, and openly to talk of secession.  Sir, the world will scarcely believe that this whole controversy, and all the desperate measures which its support requires, have no other foundation than a difference of opinion upon a provision of the Constitution, between a majority of the people of South Carolina, on one side, and a vast majority of the whole people of the United States, on the other.  It will not credit the fact, it will not admit the possibility, that, in an enlightened age, in a free, popular republic, under a constitution where the people govern, as they must always govern under such systems, by majorities, at a time of unprecedented prosperity, without practical oppression, without evils such as may not only be pretended, but felt and experienced,—­evils not slight or temporary, but deep, permanent, and intolerable,—­a single State should rush into conflict with all the rest, attempt to put down the power of the Union by her own laws, and to support those laws by her military power, and thus break up and destroy the world’s last hope.  And well the world may be incredulous.  We, who see and hear it, can ourselves hardly yet believe it.  Even after all that had preceded it, this ordinance