The Great Issues Now Before the Country (Classic Reprint): An Oration

Excerpt from The Great Issues Now Before the Country: An Oration
The United States were particularly referred to on all occasions, and in all countries, as an illustration of the mighty influence of free governments in promoting the prosperity of states. In England, notwithstanding some diplomatic collisions on boundary questions, and occasional hostile reminiscences of the past, there has hardly been a debate for thirty years, in parliament, on any topic, in reference to which this country in the nature of things afforded matters of comparison, in which it was not referred to as furnishing instructive examples of prosperous enterprise and hopeful progress. At home the country grew as by enchantment. Its vast territorial extent, augmented by magnificent accessions of conterminous territory peacefully made; its population for more rapidly increasing than that of any other country, and swelled by an emigration from Europe such as the world has never before seen; the mutually beneficial intercourse between its different sections and climates, each supplying what the other wants; the rapidity with which the arts of civilization have been extended over a before unsettled wilderness, and, together with this material prosperity, the advance of the country in education, literature, science, and refinement, formed a spectacle of which the history of mankind furnished no other example. That such was the state of the country six months ago was matter of general recognition, and acknowledgment at home and abroad.
There was, however, one sad deduction to be made, not from the truth of this description, not from the fidelity of this picture, for that is incontestable, but from the content, happiness, and mutual good-will which ought to have existed on the part of a people favored by such an accumulation of providential blessings. I allude, of course, to the great sectional controversies which have so long agitated the country and arrayed the people in bitter geographical antagonism of political organization and action. Fierce party contentions had always existed in the United States, as they ever have and unquestionably ever will exist under all free elective governments; and these contentions had, from the first, tended somewhat to a sectional character. They had not, however, till quite lately, assumed that character so exclusively, that the minority in any one part of the country had not had a respectable electoral representation in every other. Till last November, there has never been a Southern presidential candidate who did not receive electoral votes at the North, nor a Northern candidate who did not receive electoral votes at the South.
At the late election and for the first time, this was not the case; and consequences the most extraordinary and deplorable have resulted.
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