for them.

Now that long time has passed, Southerners and Northerners alike concede
that Calhoun made three mistakes. He fought against progress and
civilization that has destroyed slavery on moral grounds. He also failed
to see that slavery was the worst possible system of production, for if
the South produced under slavery 4,000,000 bales of cotton in 1861, now
that the coloured man is free she produces 15,000,000 bales of cotton
per year. His theory of the right of the minority as a sovereign right
of secession has broken down at the bar of civilization. If South
Carolina or any State has the right to withdraw, whenever the majority
of other States outvote it, it means that the minority always has a
right to disobey the majority, which means not simply the withdrawal of
the one State from the many States, but later, the withdrawal of a few
counties from a majority of the counties in that State, giving an
endless series of confusions. If any single doctrine is established
among civilized nations to-day it is this one, under democratic
institutions--the right of the majority to rule.

Three years later Webster once more marked out the basis of the North's
position for all time in a debate with Calhoun himself. Without the
magnificent flights of eloquence which distinguished the Reply to Hayne,
this speech of February 16, 1833, was filled with close and powerful
reasoning. Once and for all he maintained:

"1. That the Constitution of the United States is not a league,
confederacy, or compact between the people of the several States, in
their sovereign capacities, but a government proper, founded on the
adoption of the people, and creating direct relations between itself and
individuals.

"2. That no State authority has power to dissolve these relations; that
nothing can dissolve them but revolution. And that consequently there
can be no such thing as secession without revolution."

The importance of that argument in the history of our country cannot be
overestimated. As James Ford Rhodes has put it: "The justification
alleged by the South for her secession in 1861 was based on the
principles enunciated by Calhoun; the cause was slavery. Had there been
no slavery, the Calhoun theory of the Constitution would never have been
propounded, or had it been, it would have been crushed beyond
resurrection by Webster's speeches of 1830 and 1833. The South could not
in 1861 justify her right to revolution, for there was no op