of attachment to the national government.  Gentlemen, no one can estimate more highly than I do the natural advantages of your city.  No one entertains a higher opinion than myself, also, of that spirit of wise and liberal policy, which has actuated the government of your own great State in the accomplishment of high objects, important to the growth and prosperity both of the State and the city.  But all these local advantages, and all this enlightened state policy, could never have made your city what it now is, without the aid and protection of a general government, extending over all the States, and establishing for all a common and uniform system of commercial regulation.  Without national character, without public credit, without systematic finance, without uniformity of commercial laws, all other advantages possessed by this city would have decayed and perished, like unripe fruit.  A general government was, for years before it was instituted, the great object of desire to the inhabitants of this city.  New York, at a very early day, was conscious of her local advantages for commerce; she saw her destiny, and was eager to embrace it; but nothing else than a general government could make free her path before her, and set her forward on her brilliant career.  She early saw all this, and to the accomplishment of this great and indispensable object she bent every faculty, and exerted every effort.  She was not mistaken.  She formed no false judgment.  At the moment of the adoption of the Constitution, New York was the capital of one State, and contained thirty-two or three thousand people.  It now contains more than two hundred thousand people, and is justly regarded as the commercial capital, not only of all the United States, but of the whole continent also, from the pole to the South Sea.  Every page of her history, for the last forty years, bears high and irresistible testimony to the benefits and blessings of the general government.  Her astonishing growth is referred to, and quoted, all the world over, as one of the most striking proofs of the effects of our Federal Union.  To suppose her now to be easy and indifferent, when notions are advanced tending to its dissolution, would be to suppose her equally forgetful of the past and blind to the present, alike ignorant of her own history and her own interest, metamorphosed, from all that she has been, into a being tired of its prosperity, sick of its own growth and greatness, and infatuated for its own destruction.  Every blow aimed at the union of the States strikes on the tenderest nerve of her interest and her happiness.  To bring the Union into debate is to bring her own future prosperity into debate also.  To speak of arresting the laws of the Union, of interposing State power in matters of commerce and revenue, of weakening the full and just authority of the general government, would be, in regard to this city, but another mode of speaking of commercial ruin, of abandoned wharfs, of vacated houses, of diminished and dispersing population, of bankrupt merchants, of mechanics without employment, and laborers without bread.  The growth of this city and the Constitution of the United States are coevals and contemporaries.  They began together, they have flourished together, and if rashness and folly destroy one, the other will follow it to the tomb.