Attorney for Pennsylvania in 1791, declined the office of United States District Judge in 1792, and was Chancellor of the Law Association of Philadelphia from 1822 till his death in 1836, wrote an elaborate work on the Constitution, which was published in 1825. He had been a firm supporter of President John Adams's Administration; but when he entered upon the investigations necessary to prepare himself for the composition of his great work-RAWLE ON THE CONSTITUTION-he was brought to the same conclusion that closer study brought Mr. Webster to. He said:

"The Union is an association of the people of Republics; its preservation is calculated to depend on the preservation of those Republics. * * * It depends on the State itself, to retain or abolish the principle of representation; because it depends on itself, whether it will continue a member of the Union. To deny this right, would be inconsistent with the principles on which all our political systems are founded; which is, that the people have, in all cases, a right to determine how they will be governed.

"This right must be considered as an ingredient in the original composition of the General Government, which, though not expressed, was mutually understood," etc.

8. In 1839 ex-President John Q. Adams delivered an address before the New York Historical Society, in which he said: "The indissoluble link of union between the people of the several States of this confederated nation is, after all, not in the right, but in the heart. If the day should ever come (may Heaven avert it) when the affections of the people of these States shall be alienated from each other-the bonds of political association will not long hold together parties no longer attracted by the magnetism of conciliated interests and kindly sympathies; and far better will it be for the peo

ple of the disunited States to part in friendship with each other than to be held together by constraint. Then will be the time for reverting to the precedents which occurred at the formation and adoption of the Constitution, to form again a more perfect Union, by dissolving that which could no longer bind, and to leave the separated parts to be reunited by the law of political gravitation to the center."

9. In this same year (1839) the question whether the laws of nations, or the laws which regulate the intercourse of separate sovereignties, apply to the States of the Union, was decided by the Supreme Court in the case of The Bank of Augusta vs. Earle. The Court in the course of its decision said: "They are sovereign States. * * * We think it well settled, that by the law of comity among nations, a corporation created by one sovereign is permitted to make contracts in another, and to sue in its courts; and that the same law of comity prevails among the several sovereignties of this Union.”

10. In 1841, while abolition societies were exerting themselves to disrupt the Union, and their emissaries had been violating the privileges of debate in the House of Representatives by vilifying the people of the Southern States and their Representatives, not only in disregard of the rules of the House, but of the Constitution itself, since the subject they discussed was beyond the Constitutional control of the Congress, Gen. William H. Harrison expressed himself as follows in his Inaugural Address: "It was, indeed, the ambition of the leading States of Greece to control the domestic concerns of the others, that the destruction of that celebrated confederacy, and subsequently of all its members, is mainly to be attributed. And it is owing to the absence of that spirit that the Helvetec confederacy has for so many years been preserved.

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"Our confederacy, fellow-citizens, can only be preserved by the same forbearance. The attempt of those (citizens) of one State to control the domestic institutions of another, can only result in feelings of distrust and jealousy, and are certain harbingers of disunion, civil war, and the ultimate destruction of our free institutions. Our confederacy is perfectly illustrated by the terms and principles governing a common copartnership.

11. In 1844 the Legislature of Massachusetts threatened the President and the Congress in this style: "The project of the annexation of Texas, unless arrested on the threshold, may tend to drive these States (New England) into a dissolution of the Union."

12. In 1851 Daniel Webster, "the Great Expounder of the Constitution," delivered a speech at Capon Springs, Virginia, wherein he said:

"If the South were to violate any part of the Constitution intentionally and systematically, and persist in so doing year after year, and no remedy could be had, would the North be any longer bound by the rest of it? And if the North were, deliberately, habitually, and of fixed purpose, to disregard one part of it, would the South be bound any longer to observe its other obligations? * * *

"How absurd it is to suppose that, when different parties enter into a compact for certain purposes, either can disregard any one provision, and expect, nevertheless, the other to observe the rest! * * * A bargain can not be broken on one side, and still bind the other side."

13. In 1855 Senator Benjamin F. Wade, of Ohio, whose extreme bitterness towards the Southern people, and whose support of all the usurping measures of the radicals from 1861 till his retirement from the Senate in 1867, made him a conspicuous figure and perhaps

constituted his chief qualification for the Vice-Presidency after Andrew Johnson became President, delivered a speech in the Senate, of which the following is an extract:

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Who is to be judge, in the last resort, of the violation of the Constitution of the United States by the enactment of a law? Who is the final arbiter? The General Government, or the States in their sovereignty? Why, sir, to yield that point, is to yield up all the rights of the States to protect their own citizens, and to consolidate this Government into a miserable despotism. "I said there were States in this Union whose highest tribunals had adjudged that bill to be unconstitutional; * * that my State believed it unconstitutional: and that, under the old Resolutions of 1798 and 1799, a State must not only be the judge of that, but of the remedy in such a case."

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14. In 1857 Lippincott's PRONOUNCING GAZETTEER OF THE WORD was first published, containing this definition: "The government of the United States is a confederation of independent sovereignties, delegating a portion of their power to a central government, "etc.

15. On the 9th of November, 1860, eleven days before South Carolina seceded, Horace Greeley, the editor of the New York Tribune, and one of the most able of the founders of the party which elected the President in 1860, published the following in his paper:

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"The telegraph informs us that most of the cotton States are meditating a withdrawal from the Union, because of Lincoln's election. * * If the cotton States consider the value of the Union debatable, we maintain their perfect right to discuss it. Nay: we hold, with Jefferson, to the inalienable right of communities to alter or abolish forms of government that have become oppressive or injurious; and, if the cotton States

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shall decide that they can do better out of the Union than in it, we insist on letting them go in peace. right to secede may be a revolutionary one, but it exists nevertheless; and we do not see how one party can have a right to do what another party has a right to prevent."

On this solid foundation-this recognition of the truth by a long line of the natural guides of an intelligent people-South Carolina based her expectation of success in her negotiations with the Federal authorities.

But she was disappointed; Mr. Buchanan lacked the courage of his convictions, and while turning the subject over to Congress, he claimed that it was his duty to hold and defend the property belonging to the United States, on the theory that it was the duty of the President of the United States to defend the city and harbor of Charleston-the purpose for which South Carolina had given her consent for the purchase of the sites of the forts, arsenals, magazines, etc.—after that State had withdrawn from the Union.

During this period of uncertainty and excitement two efforts were made to bring about peace and reconciliation. The first was made in the Senate by the venerable John J. Crittenden, of Kentucky. He proposed certain amendments to the Constitution, which, if adopted, would perhaps have satisfied the South; but the angry radicals voted them down. The second was a proposition by Virginia of a "Peace Congress" of all the States then in the Union to "consider, and if practicable, agree upon some satisfactory adjustment." This Congress met on the 4th of February, 1861, and adjourned on the 27th of the same month. It had during its sessions representatives from all the States then in the Union except Arkansas, California, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Oregon; but the necessity of "saving the Republican Party from rupture," as Sena