irresponsible Congress, exercising revolutionary but unlimited powers
over a large section of the common country. You then had an
illustration, not soon to be forgotten, of concentration of legislative
power. An episode at once painful and discreditable, it is not necessary
here to refer to it in detail. Appeal, however, was made to the
principle of local self-government,--it was, so to speak, a recurrence
to the theory of State Sovereignty. The appeal struck a responsive,
because traditional, chord; and it was through a recurrence to State
Sovereignty as the agency of local self-government that loyalty and
contentment were restored, and, I may add, that I am here to-day.
Ceasing to be a Military Department, South Carolina once more became a
State. Not improbably the demand will in a not remote future be heard
that State lines and local autonomy be practically obliterated. In that
event, I feel a confident assurance that, recurring in memory to the
evil days which followed 1865, the spirit of enlightened conservatism
will assert itself here and in the sister States of what was once the
Confederacy; and again it will prevail. In the future, as in the past,
you in South Carolina at least will cling to what in 1876 proved the ark
of your social and political salvation.

Taking another step in the discussion of changes, the Constitution is
founded on that well-known distribution and allocation of powers first
theoretically suggested by Montesquieu. There is a division, accompanied
by a mutual limitation of authority, through the Judiciary, the
Executive, and the Legislative. As respects this allocation, how would I
modify that instrument? I freely say that the tendency of my thought,
based on observation, is to conservatism. I have never yet in a single
instance found that when the people of this or any other country
accustomed to parliamentary government desired a thing, they failed to
obtain it within a reasonable limit of time. Hasty changes are wisely