knew they could make no advancement directly in the teeth of these
strong and noble sentiments. Accordingly, they commenced by an insidious
debauching of the public mind. They invented an ingenious sophism,
which, if conceded, was followed by perfectly logical steps through all
the incidents to the complete destruction of the Union. The sophism
itself is that any State of the Union may _consistently_ with the
National Constitution, and therefore _lawfully_ and _peacefully_,
withdraw from the Union without the consent of the Union or of any other
State. The little disguise that the supposed right is to be exercised
only for just cause, themselves to be the sole judge of its justice,
is too thin to merit any notice.

With rebellion thus sugar coated they have been drugging the public mind
of their section for more than thirty years, and until at length they
have brought many good men to a willingness to take up arms against the
Government the day _after_ some assemblage of men have enacted the
farcical pretense of taking their State out of the Union who could have
been brought to no such thing the day _before_.

This sophism derives much, perhaps the whole, of its currency from the
assumption that there is some omnipotent and sacred supremacy pertaining
to a _State_--to each State of our Federal Union. Our States have
neither more nor less power than that reserved to them in the Union by
the Constitution, no one of them ever having been a State _out_ of the
Union. The original ones passed into the Union even _before_ they cast
off their British colonial dependence, and the new ones each came into
the Union directly from a condition of dependence, excepting Texas; and
even Texas, in its temporary independence, was never designated a State.
The new ones only took the designation of States on coming into the
Union, while that name was first adopted for the old ones in and by the