cities, and your accumulated millions of moneyed capital, ready to be invested in profitable enterprises in any part of the world, answer that question.  Do you complain of a narrow and jealous policy under Southern rule, in extending and opening new fields of enterprise to your hardy sons in the great West, along the line of the great chain of American lakes, even to the head waters of the Father of Rivers, and over the rich and fertile plains stretching southward from the lake shores?  Let the teeming populations—­let the hundreds of millions of annual products that have succeeded to the but recent dreary and unproductive haunts of the red man—­answer that question.  That very preponderance of free States which the Senator from New York contemplates with such satisfaction, and which has moved him exultingly to exclaim that there is at last a North side of this Chamber, has been hastened by the liberal policy of Southern Presidents and Southern statesmen; and has it become the ambition of that Senator to unite and combine all this great, rich, and powerful North in the policy of crippling the resources and repressing the power of the South?  Is this to be the one idea which is to mold the policy of the government, when that gentleman and his friends shall control it?  If it be, then I appeal to the better feelings and the better judgment of his followers to arrest him in his mad career.  Sir, let us have some brief interval of repose at least from this eternal agitation of the slavery question.  Let power go into whatever hands it may, let us save the Union!

I have all the confidence other gentlemen can have in the extent to which this Union is intrenched in the hearts of the great mass of the people of the North and South; but when I reflect upon and consider the desperate and dangerous extremes to which ambitious party leaders are often prepared to go, without meaning to do the country any mischief, in the struggle for the imperial power, the crown of the American presidency, I sometimes tremble for its fate.

Two great parties are now dividing the Union on this question.  It is evident to every man of sense, who examines it, that practically, in respect to slavery, the result will be the same both to North and South; Kansas will be a free State, no matter what may be the decision on this question.  But how that decision may affect the fortunes of those parties, is not certain; and there is the chief difficulty.  But the greatest question of all is, How will that decision affect the country as a whole?

Two adverse yet concurrent and mighty forces are driving the vessel of State towards the rocks upon which she must split, unless she receives timely aid—­a paradox, yet expressive of a momentous and perhaps a fatal truth.

There is no hope of rescue unless the sober-minded men, both of the North and South, shall, by some sufficient influence, be brought to adopt the wise maxims and sage counsels of the great founders of our government.