the National authority. The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the Government, and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere. Where hostility to the United States, in any interior locality, shall be so great and universal as to prevent competent resident citizens from holding the Federal offices, there will be no attempt to force obnoxious strangers among the people for that object. While the strict legal right may exist in the government to enforce the exercise of these offices, the attempt to do so would be so irritating, and so nearly impracticable withal, that I deem it better to forego, for the time, the uses of such offices.

"The mails, unless repelled, will continue to be furnished in all parts of the Union. So far as possible, the people everywhere shall have that sense of perfect security which is most favorable to calm thought and reflection. The course here indicated will be followed, unless current events and experience shall show a modification or change to be proper, and in every case and exigency my best discretion. will be exercised, according to circumstances actually existing, and with a view and a hope of a peaceful solution of the National troubles, and the restoration of fraternal sympathies and affections."

"Before entering upon so grave a matter as the destruction of our National fabric, with all its benefits, its memories, its hopes, would it not be wise to ascertain why we do it? Will you hazard so desperate a step while there is any possibility that any portion of the ills you fly from have no real existence? Will you, while the certain ills you fly to are greater than all the real ones you fly from-will you risk the commission of so fearful a mistake?

"All profess to be content in the Union, if all constitutional rights can be maintained. But no organic law can ever be framed with a provision specifically applicable to every question which may occur in practical

administration. rendered by National or State authority? The Constitution does not expressly say. May Congress prohibit slavery in the Territories? The Constitution does not expressly say. Must Congress protect slavery in the Territories? Constitution does not expressly say.

Shall fugitives from labor be sur

The

"From questions of this class spring all our constitutional controversies, and we divide upon them into majorities and minorities. If the minority will not acquiesce, the majority must, or the government must cease. There is no other alternative; for continuing the government is acquiescence on one side or the other. If a majority in such case will secede rather than acquiesce, they may make a precedent which, in turn, will divide and ruin them; for a minority of their own will secede from them whenever a majority refuses to be controlled by such a minority. For instance, why may not any portion of a new Confederacy, a year or two hence, arbitrarily secede again, precisely as portions of the present Union now claim to secede from it? All who cherish disunion sentiments are now being educated to the exact temper of doing this.

"Is there such perfect identity of interests among the States to compose a new Union, as to produce harmony, only, and prevent renewed secession?

"Plainly, the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy. A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it, does, of necessity, fly to anarchy or despotism. Unanimity is impossible; the rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy or despotism, in some form, is all that is left.

"Physically speaking, we cannot separate. We cannot remove our respective sections from each other, nor build an impassable wall between them. A husband and wife may

be divorced, and go out of the presence and beyond the reach of each other; but the different parts of our country cannot do this. They cannot but remain face to face, and intercourse, either amicable or hostile, must continue between them. It is impossible, then, to make that intercourse more advantageous or more satisfactory after separation than before. Can aliens make treaties easier than friends can make laws? Can treaties be more faithfully enforced between aliens than laws among friends? Suppose you go to war, you cannot fight always, and when after much loss on both sides and no gain on either you cease fighting, the identical old questions as to terms of intercourse are again upon you.

I un

"This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it. I cannot be ignorant of the fact that many worthy and patriotic citizens are desirous of having the National Constitution amended. derstand a proposed amendment to the Constitution-which amendment, however, I have not seen-has passed Congress, to the effect that the Federal Government shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the States, including that of persons held to service. To avoid misconstruction of what I have said, I depart from my purpose not to speak of particular amendments, so far as to say, that holding such a provision now to be implied constitutional law, I have no objections to its being made express and irrevocable.

"In your hands, my dissatisfied countrymen, and not in mine, are the momentous issues of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to 'preserve, protect and defend' it.

"I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have

strained, it must not break, our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field and patriot grave to every living heart and hearth-stone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."

The constitutional amendment to which Lincoln referred and to which he assented as "implied constitutional law," passed Congress on the last day of Buchanan's administration and was signed by him, probably his last official act. It read:

"Article XIII.-No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State."

It was the last attempt by the National government to concede to the will of slavocracy and in the agitation of civil war was lost and forgotten, yet it was ratified by a convention in Illinois, and by the legislatures of Maryland and Ohio.

If it be asked, What were the causes of the Civil War?— and an outline of those causes has been given in this chapter and the two preceding-the answer, comprehensively, must be, slavery. Once introduced into the country, the selfishness of men and climate made its continuance possible. The original domain of the United States was supposed, by the Fathers, to be fairly divided between freedom and slavery, but the extension of the national domain across the Mississippi by the purchase of the Louisiana country precipitated a contest over slavery extension which waxed more serious down to the election of Lincoln to the presidency. Into that contest all other forces were drawn: conflicting theories of the nature of the Union and conflicting theories of its proper administration. The slave power grew until it controlled the Federal government, but it lacked an economic basis: land and people. Industrially it could not compete

with free labor. Looking back now over the development of the country down to 1860, it is difficult to understand how civil war could be avoided. The idea of Confederacy was hostile to the idea of Nationality, and no Federal government which human beings are ever likely to make could be administered to the equal satisfaction of the slave States and the free States.

South Carolina declared in the most solemn manner what it held to be the causes, the justifiable causes for its secession from the Union: some of these are political, some economic, some constitutional, some climatic, some social: but the essential cause was the incompatibility of free institutions and slave institutions under the same General government. Search as one may into the archives, and weigh as he must all the evidence, he will at last reach the conclusion, now a matter of history, but when first uttered a startling assertion, and considered by the South, and by many at the North, as merely a piece of political propagandism:

"A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this Government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved-I do not expect the house to fall-but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all the one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new-North as well as South."

The obscure man who uttered these words in 1858 was now president of the United States. What would he do, what would the Nation do to keep the house from falling?