a Government which protects every citizen in the full enjoyment of
his rights, and is able to protect the nation against injustice
from foreign powers.

Other considerations of the highest importance admonish us to
cherish our Union and to cling to the Government which supports
it. Fortunate as we are in our political institutions, we have not
been less so in other circumstances on which our prosperity and
happiness essentially depend. Situated within the temperate zone,
and extending through many degrees of latitude along the Atlantic,
the United States enjoy all the varieties of climate, and every
production incident to that portion of the globe. Penetrating
internally to the Great Lakes and beyond the sources of the great
rivers which communicate through our whole interior, no country
was ever happier with respect to its domain. Blessed, too, with a
fertile soil, our produce has always been very abundant, leaving,
even in years the least favorable, a surplus for the wants of our
fellow-men in other countries. Such is our peculiar felicity that
there is not a part of our Union that is not particularly
interested in preserving it. The great agricultural interest of
the nation prospers under its protection. Local interests are not
less fostered by it. Our fellow-citizens of the North engaged in
navigation find great encouragement in being made the favored
carriers of the vast productions of the other portions of the
United States, while the inhabitants of these are amply
recompensed, in their turn, by the nursery for seamen and naval
force thus formed and reared up for the support of our common
rights. Our manufactures find a generous encouragement by the
policy which patronizes domestic industry, and the surplus of our
produce a steady and profitable market by local wants in less-