The Pacific Railway will neutralize these mountains, and complete the geographical unity of the continent.

The slender wire of the telegraph, when once extended, is an indissoluble tie; the railway is an iron band.

He has studied history poorly, and human nature no better, who imagines that this broad compacted country can be parcelled into different nationalities.

No line of longitude or latitude, no mountain, no river, can become the demarcation.

The whole country has a title, which it will never renounce, in every part, whether the voluminous Mississippi as it pours to the sea, or that same sea as it chafes upon our coast.

As well might we of the East attempt to shut you of the West from the ocean as you attempt to shut us from the Mississippi.

The ocean will always be yours as it is ours, and the Mississippi will always be ours as it is yours.

Our country was planned by Providence for a united and homogeneous people.

Unmeasured supplies of all kinds, mineral and agricultural, are at hand,--the richest ores and the most golden crops, with the largest coal-fields of the world below and the largest corn-fields of the world above.

Our plains are vaster and our rivers more considerable, furnishing a theatre grander than any imagined by the Greek geographer.

It is this theatre, thus appointed by Nature, which is now open for the good of mankind.

And thus do I bind the whole together into one conclusion, saying to all, We are a Nation.

As a Nation, with a place in the family of nations, we have the powers of a nation, with corresponding responsibilities.

Whether we regard these powers as naturally inhering in the nation, or as conferred upon it by those two title-deeds, the Declaration of Independence and the National Constitution, the conclusion is the same.

They belong to our nation by the very law of its being and the terms of its creation.

Every word, from “We, the people,” to the signature, “George Washington,” is instinct with national life, and there is not a single expression taking from the National Government any inherent power.

From this “nothing” in the Constitution there can come nothing adverse.

By that sacred instrument we were declared “one people,” with liberty and equality for all, and then, fixing forever the rights of citizenship, it was announced that all just government was derived only from “the consent of the governed.”…

It is part of the nation, and the part most worthy of immortality.

By it the National Constitution must be interpreted; or rather, the two together are the Constitution,--as Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights together are the British Constitution.

By the Declaration our nation was born and its vital principles were announced; by the Constitution the nation was born again and supplied with the machinery of government.

The same spirit which has been so hostile to national unity in other countries, which made each feudal chief a petty sovereign, which for a long time convulsed France, which for centuries divided Italy, and which, unhappily, still divides…

The partisans of State pretensions, plausibly professing to decentralize the Government, have done everything possible to denationalize it.

In the name of self-government, they have organized local lordships hostile to Human Rights; in the name of the States, they have sacrificed the Nation.

Now let me tell the Senator that the doctrines which we advocate are the result of the fullest and most careful examination of our system of government, and that our conviction that we constitute an Union, and not a Nation, is as strong…