truth if the South had said,--"We do not want to live with you Northern
people any longer; we know our institution of slavery is obnoxious to
you, and, as you are growing numerically stronger than we, it may at
some time in the future be endangered. So long as you permitted us to
control the government, and with the aid of a few friends at the North
to enact laws constituting your section a guard against the escape of
our property, we were willing to live with you. You have been
submissive to our rule heretofore; but it looks now as if you did not
intend to continue so, and we will remain in the Union no longer."
Instead of this the seceding States cried lustily,--"Let us alone; you
have no constitutional power to interfere with us." Newspapers and
people at the North reiterated the cry. Individuals might ignore the
constitution; but the Nation itself must not only obey it, but must
enforce the strictest construction of that instrument; the construction
put upon it by the Southerners themselves. The fact is the constitution
did not apply to any such contingency as the one existing from 1861 to
1865. Its framers never dreamed of such a contingency occurring. If
they had foreseen it, the probabilities are they would have sanctioned
the right of a State or States to withdraw rather than that there should
be war between brothers.

The framers were wise in their generation and wanted to do the very best
possible to secure their own liberty and independence, and that also of
their descendants to the latest days. It is preposterous to suppose
that the people of one generation can lay down the best and only rules
of government for all who are to come after them, and under unforeseen
contingencies. At the time of the framing of our constitution the only
physical forces that had been subdued and made to serve man and do his
labor, were the currents in the streams and in the air we breathe. Rude
machinery, propelled by water power, had been invented; sails to propel