Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 9.djvu/51

 WEBSTER principle and feeling, than Massachusetts and South Carolina. Would to God that harmony might again return! Shoulder to shoulder they went through the Revolution ; hand in hand they stood round the administration of Washington, and felt his own great arm lean on them for support. Unkind feeling (if it exist), alienation, and distrust are the growth, unnatural to such soils, of false principles since sown. They are weeds, the seeds of which that same great arm never scattered. Mr. President, I shall enter on no encomium upon Massachusetts; she needs none. There she is 13 Behold her, and judge for yourselves. There is her history ; the world knows it by heart. The past, at least, is secure. There is Boston, and Concord, and Lexington, and Bunker Hill; and there they will remain for ever. The bones of her sons, falling in the great struggle for Inde- pendence, now lie mingled with the soil of every State from New England to Georgia ; and there they will lie for ever. And, sir, where American Liberty raised its first voice, and where its youth was nurtured and sustained, there it still lives, in the strength of its manhood and full of its original spirit. If discord and disunion shall wound it, if party strife and blind ambition shall hawk at and tear it, if folly and madness, if uneasiness under salutary and necessary re- stramt, shall succeed in separating !t from that Union by which alone its existence is made sure, it will stand, in the end, by the side of that cradle 41