It is well worth a fair and full experiment.

With such powerful and obvious motives to union, affecting all parts of our country, while experience shall not have demonstrated its impracticability, there will always be reason to distrust the patriotism of those, who, in any quarter, may endeavour to weaken its bands.
"In contemplating the causes which may disturb our union, it occurs as matter of serious concern, that any ground should have been furnished for characterizing parties by _geographical_ discriminations,--_northern_ and _southern_--_Atlantic_ and _western_; whence designing men may endeavour to excite a belief that there is a real difference of local interests and views.

One of the expedients of party to acquire influence within particular districts, is to misrepresent the opinions and aims of other districts.

You can not shield yourselves too much against the jealousies and heart burnings which spring from these misrepresentations: they tend to render alien to each other those who ought to be bound together by fraternal affection.

The inhabitants of our western country have lately had a useful lesson on this head: they have seen, in the negotiation by the executive, and in the unanimous ratification by the senate of the treaty with Spain, and in the universal satisfaction at the event throughout the United States, a decisive proof how unfounded were the suspicions propagated among them of a policy in the general government and in the Atlantic states, unfriendly to their interests in regard to the Mississippi.