of the nation, and to assume for these an original and independent existence, and an actual sovereignty, is a contradiction. It places the created above the creator.

Seventhly, These societies are so constituted that citizenship exists in all its rights and powers in the whole, and the citizens of the United States are the citizens of every State. It is one political body, to which the members are individually related. There is no expatriation on passing from one society to another; and no naturalization is requisite in the change from one section to another, and there is in no separate society the power for such action. But to apprehend a State as existent, apart from the people comprehended in it, is an abstraction, and can appear only in the vision of political speculations.

Eighthly, The separate societies have not the constituent elements of political power. The rights which appear in a national sovereignty and the correspondent powers, are not possessed by them. They have not separately the capacities of an independent political people. Their construction is in a civil system, and they are without the conditions of integral political supremacy. Whatever may be the inference of speculations and the course of legal hypotheses, this is the fact of their condition.

Ninthly, They have no external relation apart from the United States. It is the latter alone which is manifest in an external sovereignty. They are constituted in a form necessary to internal order and administration, and have none of the indices of power in which a nation appears in its external sovereignty, maintaining its own relations, and acknowledging on earth no external control beyond itself.

Tenthly, The separate societies have not the physical unity which appears in the being of an independent nation. They have in their existence no conformance to its geographical law. They are defined by no natural and no historical boundaries, but every natural and historical boundary is erased in their interrelation. There are none

of those lines that demark the existence of a separate people on the earth. In the collision of events, and the conflict and migration of races, and the crush of the forces of history, which are mightier in their duration than those of physical nature, if a separate existence was assumed they would become in the first shock so changed as to lose their identity, and history could not recognize them.

But while the argument in its conclusion allows no digression, and has in the records of scarcely any years in the existence of a people, a parallel in height and fullness, yet an argument is only illustrative, and in the presence of the being of the people, and in the realization of history, there is presumption in any argument. The evidence is in the being of the people, and from its conscious unity there is no appeal, and it allows no inquiry. If there be not the consciousness of the unity and sovereignty and freedom which subsist in the organic being of the people, then all argument is empty, and all inquiry is vain. The realization of history can be determined by no political abstractions, and events conform to no individual preconceptions. Facts do not defer to theories; in the strong image of the poet, "words are men's daughters, but God's sons are things."

The principle in which the character and relation of the separate civil societies are defined, whatever its form, necessarily affects the foundation of society, and is constructive of its whole process. If there be assumed for each a necessary and continuous existence, then each is a selfsubsistent power, and then the bond which holds them as collective, that is, as a combination of certain separate and self-subsistent societies, is formal, and the principle in which their relation is formed must be necessarily the confederate principle. To maintain then the continuous union of each with all, and to compel each to persist continuously in connection with another or with all in this formal relation, would not only be destructive of the sove

reignty and independence presumed in each, but when this compulsion was made against its clearly and persistently expressed intent, it would become the institution of human society in force. It would involve in human society the maintenance through physical force of a formal order, and not the existence of an integral or organic and moral being.

The principle which is the necessary postulate of the confederacy has been defined clearly, and has been held strenuously. There was nothing vague in the attempt at secession, nor in the premise on which it proceeded. It was the assumption of the sovereignty and independence and continuous existence of each separate community, and the act of secession was the necessary sequence as each or any deemed itself justified to itself by the grievance it bore, or by the advantage it was to secure. The secessionists regarded themselves primarily as the citizens of these separate communities, and subject to the ultimate authority of each, and became confederate in and for the protection and furtherance of a special interest, which was assumed as the immediate object.

The confederate principle which was manifest in the denial of the organic and moral being of the nation, could appear only as a destructive force. It had its necessary sequence, as it sought its realization, in an attempt at the dissolution of the whole.

The conflict of the confederate principle with the nation has been borne on through all the years of the people. There are memorials and declarations, and enactments and proclamations, and judicial decisions and state papers, which are framed in conformance to the scheme of a confederacy, or formed in the realization of the being of the nation.1 And still in the devices of parties and the expe

1 There is a force often imputed to some textual statement, in which it is so construed as to compel history, and thus a notion or dogma counter to all reality may be built upon some political memorial, as the phrase of a state paper. There is an illustration of this in the speculations of Mr. Calhoun. An article

dients of priests, and the forms of legists and the opinions of jurists, the conflict appears. The construction of government has sometimes been conceived to exist in a compromise, but the fact has been their inevitable conflict. As in their conception each involves the negation of the other, there has been in history their incessant antagonism. As the nation is formed in its unity in the will of God in history, and is manifest in the divine guidance of the people, and advances in its continuity in the transmission of its purpose from the fathers to the children, in the fulfillment of the vocation of the whole people, and exists in the realization in its organic and moral being of a moral order in history, so the confederacy denies the unity and conof the Confederation reads, "each State retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence, and every power, etc.," and thus it is assumed as the reality in history that each State or society possessed a real sovereignty and independence, and all the political powers involved in a sovereign and independent political being. There is then maintained in strict consistency and as the immediate inference of this postulate, the necessary and continuous existence of each State or society as a political power, and having all political powers immanent in the political body. It is on the phrase of a state document that the whole fabric is constructed, and for all time. See Calhoun's Works, vol. i. p. 148. The original sovereignty is not the creation of a legal formula, since it is itself the power which can affirm its will as law, and thus in France, for instance, at one period, the most various constitutions, each having the authority of law, succeeded each other; but it is not presumed that the actual condition changed with each state document, that appeared, as it was said, so rapidly as to form a periodical lit

erature.

Mr. Hurd says, "Declaring a state of things does not make it. Since no declaration of sovereignty can be more than evidence, it may as such be compared with other testimony. The declaration of July 4th asserted the colonies to be 'free and independent states.' The accompanying declarations of an existing condition of private persons that 'all men are created equal, etc.,' all men have ' inalienable rights,' did not determine any private conditions, even though the state of private persons is the effect, and not like sovereignty, the cause of law." Law of Freedom, etc., vol. i. p. 407.

"The possession of sovereignty, being a fact and not an effect of law, whatever written memorials of the rightfulness of any national sovereignty may exist, they can only proceed from itself, and they can only be taken as historical evidences of its existence; not as law controlling that possession of sovereign power which they assert. And the authors of these declarations must always be supposed to have the right to substitute others of different term and of equal juridical authority. There can therefore be no written constitution of government so authoritative in its nature or its expression as to determine the rightful sovereignty, the rightful holders of that rightful supreme power." — Ibid. vol. i. p. 396.

tinuity in the being of the organic people, and assumes the origin and foundation of society in the convention of men, and its construction in the combination of separate interests, and its continuance in the dictation of interests; it is conditioned in the law of a temporary expediency, and as a power in the exclusive possession of a class or of a race, and for the furtherance of separate and special ends.

It cannot be too often repeated that the War was not primarily between freedom and slavery. It was the war of the nation and the confederacy.

The nation and the confederacy meet at last in mortal conflict. It is the battle of the nation for life. Confederatism, in its attack upon the nation, is in league with hell. It severs the children from the fathers. It erases the sacred memories which are their common heritage. It passes over violated oaths. It rejects a law of righteousness in the realization of society. It denies the divine origin of humanity, and the sacred rights it bears in its divine image. It refuses the foundation of its unity in the corner-stone, which is the "foundation which is lying." It forms its alliance with slavery, and that dam got its brood. It gathers to itself the pride, the treachery and infidelity of men, the worship of money, the vulgarity of fashion, and the distinction of caste. It collects its supporters out of all parties and factions and churches and sects. It is the conflict of history, the battle of Judæa with Babylon, which sweeps through all the centuries. In its awful significance, it can find but an imperfect expression in the symbols of human thought. It is but faintly imaged in the fight of the eagle and the serpent. It may never wholly cease until the end of history. The confederacy is the embodiment of the evil spirit, in which there is the destruction of the being of the nation, the organic and moral unity and continuity of society, and the subversion of the whole to selfish ends. It strives to subvert the nation

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