It cannot be good for us to send ships laden outside
with iron shields instead of inside with soft goods and hardware to
these thickly thronged American ports. It cannot be good for us to
have to throw millions into these harbors instead of taking millions
out from them. It cannot be good for us to export thousands upon
thousands of soldiers to Canada of whom only hundreds would return.
The whole turmoil, cost, and paraphernalia of such a course would be
injurious to us in the extreme, and the loss of our commerce would
be nearly ruinous. But the injury of such a war to us would be as
nothing to the injury which it would inflict upon the States. To
them for many years it would be absolutely ruinous. It would entail
not only all those losses which such a war must bring with it, but
that greater loss which would arise to the nation from the fact of
its having been powerless to prevent it. Such a war would prove
that it had lost the freedom for which it had struggled, and which
for so many years it has enjoyed. For the sake of that people as
well as for our own - and for their sakes rather than for our own -
let us, as far as may be, abstain from words which are needlessly
injurious. They have done much that is great and noble, ever since
this war has begun, and we have been slow to acknowledge it.
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