our children and our grandchildren would cry out shame upon us, if we of this generation should dishonor these ensigns of the power of the government and the harmony of that Union which is every day felt among us with so much joy and gratitude.  What is to become of the army?  What is to become of the navy?  What is to become of the public lands?  How is each of the thirty States to defend itself?  I know, although the idea has not been stated distinctly, there is to be, or it is supposed possible that there will be, a Southern Confederacy.  I do not mean, when I allude to this statement, that any one seriously contemplates such a state of things.  I do not mean to say that it is true, but I have heard it suggested elsewhere, that the idea has been entertained, that, after the dissolution of this Union, a Southern Confederacy might be formed.  I am sorry, Sir, that it has ever been thought of, talked of, or dreamed of, in the wildest flights of human imagination.  But the idea, so far as it exists, must be of a separation, assigning the slave States to one side and the free States to the other.  Sir, I may express myself too strongly, perhaps, but there are impossibilities in the natural as well as in the physical world, and I hold the idea of a separation of these States, those that are free to form one government, and those that are slave-holding to form another, as such an impossibility.  We could not separate the States by any such line, if we were to draw it.  We could not sit down here to-day and draw a line of separation that would satisfy any five men in the country.  There are natural causes that would keep and tie us together, and there are social and domestic relations which we could not break if we would, and which we should not if we could.

Sir, nobody can look over the face of this country at the present moment, nobody can see where its population is the most dense and growing, without being ready to admit, and compelled to admit, that erelong the strength of America will be in the Valley of the Mississippi.  Well, now, Sir, I beg to inquire what the wildest enthusiast has to say on the possibility of cutting that river in two, and leaving free States at its source and on its branches, and slave States down near its mouth, each forming a separate government?  Pray, Sir, let me say to the people of this country, that these things are worthy of their pondering and of their consideration.  Here, Sir, are five millions of freemen in the free States north of the river Ohio.  Can anybody suppose that this population can be severed, by a line that divides them from the territory of a foreign and an alien government, down somewhere, the Lord knows where, upon the lower banks of the Mississippi?  What would become of Missouri?  Will she join the arrondissement of the slave States?  Shall the man from the Yellowstone and the Platte be connected, in the new republic, with the man who lives on the southern extremity of the Cape of Florida?  Sir, I am ashamed to pursue