be governed by reality, not by theories and speculations. In this they proved themselves statesmen, and their work survives; and the republic, laugh as sciolists may, is, for the present and future, the model republic-as much so as was Rome in her day; and it is not simply national pride nor American self-conceit that pronounces its establishment the beginning of a new and more advanced order of civilization; such is really the fact.

The only apparently weak point in the system is in the particular states themselves. Feudalism protected the feudal aristocracy effectively for a time against both the king and the people, but left the king and the people without protection against the aristocracy, and hence it fell. It was not adequate to the wants of civil society, did not harmonize all social elements, and protect all social and individual rights and interests, and therefore could not but fail. The general government takes care of public authority and rights; the state protects private rights and personal freedom as against the general government: but what protects the citizens in their private rights, their personal freedom and independence, against the particular state government? Universal suffrage, answers the democrat. Armed with the ballot, more powerful than the sword, each citizen is able to protect himself. But this is theory, not reality. If it were true, the division of the powers of government between two coördinate governments would be of no practical importance. Experience does not sustain the theory, and the power of the ballot to protect the individual may be rendered ineffective by the tyranny of party. Experience proves that the ballot is far less effective in securing the freedom and independence of the individual citizen than is commonly pretended. The ballot of an isolated individual counts for nothing. The individual, though armed with the ballot, is as powerless, if he stands alone, as if he had it not. render it of any avail he must associate himself with a party, and look for his success in the success of his party; and to secure the success of his party, he must give up to it his own private convictions and free will. In practice, individuals are nothing individually, and parties are every thing. Even the suppression of the late rebellion, and the support of the administration in doing it, was made a party question, and the government found the leaders of the party opposed to the Republican party an obstacle hardly less difficult to surmount than the chiefs of the armies of the so-called Confederate States.

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CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES.

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Parties are formed, one hardly knows how, and controlled, no one knows by whom; but usually by demagogues, men who have some private or personal purposes, for which they wish, through party, to use the government. Parties have no conscience, no responsibility, and their very reason of being is the usurpation and concentration of power. The real practical tendency of universal suffrage is to democratic, instead of an imperial, centralism. What is to guard against this centralism? Not universal suffrage, for that tends to create it; and if the government is left to it, the government becomes practically the will of an ever-shifting and irresponsible majority. Is the remedy in written or paper constitutions? Party can break through them, and by making the judges elective by party, for short terms, and reëligible, can do so with impunity. In several of the states, the dominant majority have gained the power to govern at will, without any let or hindrance. Besides, constitutions can be altered, and have been altered, very nearly at the will of the majority. No mere paper constitutions are any protection against the usurpations of party, for party will always grasp all the power it can.

Yet the evil is not so great as it seems, for in most of the states the principle of division of powers is carried into the bosom of the state itself; in some states further than in others, but in all it obtains to some extent. In what are called the New-England states, the best-governed portion of the union, each town is a corporation, having important powers and the charge of all purely local matters-chooses its own officers, manages its own finances, takes charge of its own poor, of its own roads and bridges, and of the education of its own children. Between these corporations and the state government are the counties, that take charge of another class of interests, more general than those under the charge of the town, but less general than those of the state. In the great central and northwestern states the same system obtains, though less completely carried out. In the southern and southwestern states, the town corporations hardly exist, and the rights and interests of the poorer classes of persons have been less well protected in them than in the northern and eastern states. But with the abolition of slavery, and the lessening of the influence of the wealthy slaveholding class, with the return of peace and the revival of agricultural, industrial, and commercial prosperity, the New-England system, in its main features, is pretty sure to

be gradually introduced, or developed, and the division of powers in the state to be as effectively and as systematically carried out as it is between the general government and the particular or state governments. So, though universal suffrage, good as far as it goes, is not alone sufficient, the division of powers affords with it a not inadequate protection. No government, whose workings are intrusted to men, ever is or can be practically perfect-secure all good, and guard against all evil. In all human governments there will be defects and abuses, and he is no wise man who expects perfection from imperfection. But the American constitution, taken as a whole, and in all its parts, is the least imperfect that has ever existed, and under it individual rights, personal freedom and independence, as well as public authority or society, are better protected than under any other; and as the few barbaric elements retained from the feudal ages are eliminated, the standard of education elevated, and the whole population americanized, moulded by and to the American system, it will be found to effect all the good, with as little of the evil, as can be reasonably expected from any possible civil government or political constitution of society.

CHAPTER XII.-SECESSION.

THE doctrine that a state has a right to secede and carry with it its population and domain, has been effectually put down, and the unity and integrity of the United States as a sovereign nation have been effectively asserted on the battle-field; but the secessionists, though disposed to submit to superior force, and demean themselves henceforth as loyal citizens, most likely hold as firmly to the doctrine as before finding themselves unable to reduce it to practice, and the Union victory will remain incomplete till they are convinced in their understandings that the Union has the better reason as well as the superior military resources. The nation has conquered their bodies, but it is hardly less important for our statesmen to conquer their minds and win their hearts.

The right of secession is not claimed as a revolutionary right, or even as a conventional right. The secessionists disclaim revolutionary principles, and hold that the right of secession is anterior to the convention, a right which the

convention could neither give nor take away, because inherent in the very conception of a sovereign state. Secession is simply the repeal by the state of the act of accession to the Union; and as that act was a free, voluntary act of the state, she must always be free to repeal it. The Union is a copartnership; a state in the Union is simply a member of the firm, and has the right to withdraw when it judges it for its interest to do so. There is no power in a firm to compel a copartner to remain a member any longer than he pleases. He is undoubtedly holden for the obligations contracted by the firm while he remains a member; but for none contracted after he has withdrawn and given due notice thereof.

So of a sovereign state in the Union. The Union itself, apart from the sovereign states that compose it, is a mere abstraction, a nullity, and binds nobody. All its substance and vitality are in the agreement by which the states constitute themselves a firm or copartnership, for certain specific purposes, and for which they open an office and establish an agency under express instructions for the management of the general affairs of the firm. The state is held jointly and severally for all the legal obligations of the Union, contracted while she is in it, but no further; and is free to withdraw when she pleases, precisely as an individual may withdraw from an ordinary business firm. The remaining copartners have no right of compulsion or coercion against the seceding member, for he, saving the obligations already contracted, is as free to withdraw as they are to remain.

The population is fixed to the domain, and goes with it; the domain is attached to the state, and secedes in the secession of the state. Secession, then, carries the entire state, government, people, and domain, out of the Union, and restores ipso facto the state to its original position of a sovereign state, foreign to the United States. Being an independent sovereign state, she may enter into a new confederacy, form a new copartnership, or merge herself in some other foreign state, as she judges proper or finds opportunity. The states that seceded formed among themselves a new confederacy, more to their mind than the one formed in 1787, as they had a perfect right to do, and in the war just ended they were not rebels nor revolutionists, but a people fighting for the right of self-government, loyal citizens and true patriots defending the independence and inviolability of their country against foreign invaders. They

are to be honored for their loyalty and patriotism, and not branded as rebels and punished as traitors.

This is the secession argument, which rests on no assumption of revolutionary principles or abstract rights of man, and on no allegation of real or imaginary wrongs received from the Union, but simply on the original and inherent rights of the several states as independent sovereign states. The argument is conclusive, and the defence complete, if the Union is only a firm or copartnership, and the sovereignty vests in the states severally. The refutation of the secessionists is in the facts adduced that disprove the theory of state sovereignty, and prove that the sovereignty vests not in the states severally, but in the states united, or that the Union is sovereign, and not the states individually. The Union is not a firm, a copartnership, nor an artificial or conventional union, but a real, living, constitutional union, founded in the original and indissoluble unity of the American people, as one sovereign people. There is, indeed, no such people, if we abstract the states, but there are no states if we abstract this sovereign people or the Union. There is no Union without the states, and there are no states without the Union. The people are born states, and the states are born United States. The Union and the states are simultaneous, born together, and enter alike into the original and essential constitution of the American state. This the facts and reasonings adduced fully establish.

But this one sovereign people that exists only as organized into states does not necessarily include the whole population or territory included within the jurisdiction of the United States. It is restricted to the people and territory or domain organized into states in the Union, as in ancient Rome the ruling people were restricted to the tenants of the sacred territory, which had been surveyed, and its boundaries marked by the god Terminus, and which by no means included all the territory held by the city, and of which she was both the private proprietor and the public sovereign. The city had vast possessions acquired by confiscation, by purchase, by treaty, or by conquest, and in reference to which her celebrated agrarian laws were enacted, and which have their counterpart in our homestead and kindred laws. In this class of territory, of which the city was the private owner, was the territory of all the Roman provinces, which was held to be only leased to its occupants, who were often dispossessed, and their lands given as a recompense by the