under which we live, down to this late act of the State of
New York"--

To which he had just referred--

"one uniform current of law, of precedent, and of practice,
all going to establish the point that changes in Government
are to be brought about by the will of the people, assembled
under such legislative provisions as may be necessary to
ascertain that will truly and authentically."

If the people of a State, believing themselves oppressed, undertake to
establish a Government, independent of that to which they formerly
owed allegiance, and the latter interferes with the movement, and
employs force to prevent such a consummation, no one who acknowledges
the great truth that the basis of all free government is the "consent
of the governed," will deny that such interference is an act of
usurpation and tyranny. Those only who borrow their ideas of political
justice from the despotic codes of Europe, and are more imbued with
the spirit of METTERNICH and BOMBA than of JEFFERSON and MADISON, will
attempt to justify, palliate, or excuse such violation of the sacred
rights of the people. I have observed that often the noisiest
champions of popular rights are the first to trample those rights
under foot. The word "freedom" is continually on the tongues of
gentlemen on the other side of the Chamber; and I believe the Senator
from Tennessee has been suspected of a decided leaning to agrarianism,
so zealous has he been in advocating the rights, so entirely devoted
is he to the interests of the "dear people." But now, when the
_people_ of the seceding States have pronounced, in tones of thunder,
the fiat which absolves them from allegiance to a Government which
they no longer respect or love, these same gentlemen all lift their
hands in horror, roll up the whites of their eyes, as did old Lord
NORTH many years ago, and exclaim "Treason!" "Treason!" Then, boiling
with patriotic rage, they rise up and declare that "this treason must
be punished; the laws must be enforced." History tells us that this
was the language of King GEORGE and Lord NORTH when the colonies
renounced their allegiance to the mother country. The former of these
worthies, we are told, spent much of his life in a state of mental
darkness--in other words, he was a lunatic. The other received from
nature a narrow intellect, and inherited prejudices common to the
aristocracy of that period and of all other periods of the world's