as productive as those on which a deep vegetable mould has accumulated, yet its productiveness may not be less permanent than those.  In them the elements which support the farmer’s crop may be exhausted by cultivation or carried down into substrata of gravel or sand.  In the remote West to which so many are pressing, the emigrant will encounter an arid climate in which irrigation is necessary to ensure a return for the labor of husbandry, and this involves an original expenditure which it will usually require large capital to bear.  In this climate the sun, like a mighty pump, is daily raising the water which the currents of cold air from the mountains, or from the sea, precipitate in the form of genial showers during the period of your growing crops; and the granite of the mountains slowly, but steadily disintegrating, gives up its fertilizing property to be scattered by unseen hands over plain and over valley.  With care and with skill in its use I can see no end to the productiveness of that portion of your land which is fit for cultivation.

Your crops, and your mode of tillage are different from that to which I am accustomed, and the result is that each supplies a different segment in the circle of man’s wants.  I am glad that it is so, that it must necessarily be so.  Glad, because it is an everlasting bond between us; one which, whilst it binds, renders both doubly prosperous.  Blessed is our lot in this, that our fathers linked us together, and established free trade between us.  In the diversity of climate, and of crops, there is an assurance that entire failure cannot occur.  If disaster and blight should fall upon one section, it need not go to a foreign land in search of bread.  Famine, gaunt famine, with its skeleton step, can never pass our borders whilst the free trade of the Union continues.

But difference in pursuits, in population, and domestic institutions, have been made the basis of hostile agitation, and urged as a cause of separation.  To my mind the reverse would be the rational conclusion.  Each exchanging, the surplus of that which it can best produce for the surplus of another which it most requires, the benefit must be mutual, and the advantage common.  Here is a commercial, a selfish bond to hold us together.  But I will stop here, because the current of my thought is carrying me beyond the limit of topics proper to the occasion, and I must offer as an apology the fact, that though myself a cultivator of the soil, my mind has for several years been given so much to political subjects, that in speaking without having previously arranged what to say, the thought inadvertently runs from the matter I wished to present, into collateral questions of governmental concern.  Before turning back, however, into the original channel, permit me to say that the diversity of which I have been speaking, formed no small inducement to the union of the States, and that it has been through that union that we have attained to our present position, and stand to-day, all things considered, the happiest, and among the greatest in the family of nations.