block our path to the Pacific, under the pretence that she did not
consider her institutions safe while the other States entertained such
unscriptural prejudices against her special weakness in the patriarchal
line. Is the only result of our admitting a Territory on Monday to be
the giving it a right to steal itself and go out again on Tuesday? Or
do only the original thirteen States possess this precious privilege of
suicide? We shall need something like a Fugitive Slave Law for runaway
republics, and must get a provision inserted in our treaties with
foreign powers, that they shall help us catch any delinquent who may
take refuge with them, as South Carolina has been trying to do with
England and France. It does not matter to the argument, except so far
as the good taste of the proceeding is concerned, at what particular
time a State may make her territory foreign, thus opening one gate of
our national defences and offering a bridge to invasion. The danger of
the thing is in her making her territory foreign under any
circumstances; and it is a danger which the government must prevent, if
only for self-preservation. Within the limits of the constitution two
sovereignties cannot exist; and yet what practical odds does it make,
if a State may become sovereign by simply declaring herself so? The
legitimate consequence of secession is, not that a State becomes
sovereign, but that, so far as the general government is concerned, she
has outlawed herself, nullified her own existence as a State, and
become an aggregate of riotous men who resist the execution of the
laws.

We are told that coercion will be civil war; and so is a mob civil war,
till it is put down. In the present case, the only coercion called for
is the protection of the public property, and the collection of the
federal revenues. If it be necessary to send troops to do this, they
will not be sectional, as it is the fashion nowadays to call people who
insist on their own rights and the maintenance of the laws, but federal
troops, representing the will and power of the whole Confederacy. A
danger is always great so long as we are afraid of it; and mischief
like that now gathering head in South Carolina may soon become a
danger, if not swiftly dealt with. Mr. Buchanan seems altogether too
wholesale a disciple of the _laissez-faire_ doctrine, and has allowed
activity in mischief the same immunity from interference which is true
policy only in regard to enterprise