WESTERN INCIDENTS. 117

would encourage our enterprising men to engage in this great
enterprise—so great, sir, that the mindsof our most courageous
capitalists were almost appalled at its magnitude; and its
importance was still greater than its magnitude. But, I have
been over the ground, and as I passed over it, sir, looking out of
the car windows and endeavoring to view every acre of the ground
we passed, of the most fertile character I have ever seen, I have
realized that there was nothing in the East that at all compares
with it. Its capabilities exceed the imagination of any man, and
we can hardly arrive by our imaginations to the importance of
this great and fertile country, when it shall be covered witha
dense and enterprising population, and all those fertile acres culti-
vated, even as the land is now cultivated in the Eastern States,
and the whole of its agricultural wealth is to find its outlet
through this great city. [Applause.] And that, sir, is only the
commencement of it. Its agricultural wealth and productions
are nothing compared to the mineral wealth lying hidden now in
the mountains of that region. Why, sir, to speak of the political
necessity, some men have talked about the disunion of these
States. I never was one who believed in that, because I have
never seen where the Almighty had erected a barrier sufficient to
divide our nation into parts. [Applause.] You may look to the
Gulf of Mexico, and to all our extreme southern boundary; you
may traverse that line up to Canada, and even there you will find
no adequate boundary. [Great applause.] You may go west
from the Atlantic Ocean, traversing these vast fertile plains over
which we travelled, and you will find no place for an international
boundary line. No secessionist nor disunionist can go over the
ground and designate the line where disunion could possibly take
place. [Applause.] I never believed the thing possible, and
with a genial people, homogeneous in all their sentiments, their
habits, their education, all, as it were, one family, for any man to
suppose that there is anything that can finally rend them asunder,
is utterly preposterous. I mean to the crest of the Rocky
Mountains, for there, in my judgment, is the only place where