by our love of union to resist.  This is our duty; and the moment, in my judgment, has arrived when that duty should be performed.  We hear, every day, sentiments and arguments which would become a meeting of envoys, employed by separate governments, more than they become the common legislature of a united country.  Constant appeals are made to local interests, to geographical distinctions, and to the policy and the pride of particular States.  It would sometimes appear as if it were a settled purpose to convince the people that our Union is nothing but a jumble of different and discordant interests, which must, erelong, be all resolved into their original state of separate existence; as if, therefore, it was of no great value while it should last, and was not likely to last long.  The process of disintegration begins by urging as a fact the existence of different interests.

Sir, is not the end to which all this leads us obvious?  Who does not see that, if convictions of this kind take possession of the public mind, our Union can hereafter be nothing, while it remains, but a connection without harmony; a bond without affection; a theatre for the angry contests of local feelings, local objects, and local jealousies?  Even while it continues to exist in name, it may by these means become nothing but the mere form of a united government.  My children, and the children of those who sit around me, may meet, perhaps, in this chamber, in the next generation; but if tendencies now but too obvious be not checked, they will meet as strangers and aliens.  They will feel no sense of common interest or common country; they will cherish no common object of patriotic love.  If the same Saxon language shall fall from their lips, it may be the chief proof that they belong to the same nation.  Its vital principle exhausted and gone, its power of doing good terminated, the Union itself, become productive only of strife and contention, must ultimately fall, dishonored and unlamented.

The honorable member from Carolina himself habitually indulges in charges of usurpation and oppression against the government of his country.  He daily denounces its important measures, in the language in which our Revolutionary fathers spoke of the oppressions of the mother country.  Not merely against executive usurpation, either real or supposed, does he utter these sentiments, but against laws of Congress, laws passed by large majorities, laws sanctioned for a course of years by the people.  These laws he proclaims, every hour, to be but a series of acts of oppression.  He speaks of them as if it were an admitted fact, that such is their true character.  This is the language he utters, these are the sentiments he expresses, to the rising generation around him.  Are they sentiments and language which are likely to inspire our children with the love of union, to enlarge their patriotism, or to teach them, and to make them feel, that their destiny has made them common citizens of