I confess, Gentlemen, that having been, as I have said, in my humble career in public life, employed in that portion of the public service which is connected with the general government, I have contemplated, as the great object of every proceeding, not only the particular benefit of the moment, or the exigency of the occasion, but the preservation of this system; for I do consider it so much the result of circumstances, and that so much of it is due to fortunate concurrence, as well as to the sagacity of the great men acting upon those occasions,—­that it is an experiment of such remarkable and renowned success,—­that he is a fool or a madman who would wish to try that experiment a second time.  I see to-day, and we all see, that the descendants of the Puritans who landed upon the Rock of Plymouth; the followers of Raleigh, who settled Virginia and North Carolina; he who lives where the truncheon of empire, so to speak, was borne by Smith; the inhabitants of Georgia; he who settled under the auspices of France at the mouth of the Mississippi; the Swede on the Delaware, the Quaker of Pennsylvania,—­all find, at this day, their common interest, their common protection, their common glory, under the united government, which leaves them all, nevertheless, in the administration of their own municipal and local affairs, to be Frenchmen, or Swedes, or Quakers, or whatever they choose.  And when one considers that this system of government, I will not say has produced, because God and nature and circumstances have had an agency in it,—­but when it is considered that this system has not prevented, but has rather encouraged, the growth of the people of this country from three millions, on the glorious 4th of July, 1776, to seventeen millions now, who is there that will say, upon this hemisphere,—­nay, who is there that will stand up in any hemisphere, who is there in any part of the world, that will say that the great experiment of a united republic has failed in America?  And yet I know, Gentlemen, I feel, that this united system is held together by strong tendencies to union, at the same time that it is kept from too much leaning toward consolidation by a strong tendency in the several States to support each its own power and consideration.  In the physical world it is said, that

     “All nature’s difference keeps all nature’s peace,”

and there is in the political world this same harmonious difference, this regular play of the positive and negative powers, (if I may so say,) which, at least for one glorious half-century, has kept us as we have been kept, and made us what we are.