"Can this be done? Yes, easily! Not by the weaker party; for it
can of itself do nothing--not even protect itself--but by the
stronger.... But will the North agree to do this? It is for her
to answer this question. But, I will say, she can not refuse if
she has half the love of the Union which she professes to have,
nor without exposing herself to the charge that her love of
power and aggrandizement is far greater than her love of the
Union."

During the ten years that intervened between the date of this speech and
the message of Mr. Buchanan cited above, the progress of sectional
discord and the tendency of the stronger section to unconstitutional
aggression had been fearfully rapid. With very rare exceptions, there
were none in 1850 who claimed the right of the Federal Government to
apply coercion to a State. In 1860 men had grown to be familiar with
threats of driving the South into submission to any act that the
Government, in the hands of a Northern majority, might see fit to
perform. During the canvass of that year, demonstrations had been made
by _quasi_-military organizations in various parts of the North, which
looked unmistakably to purposes widely different from those enunciated
in the preamble to the Constitution, and to the employment of means not
authorized by the powers which the States had delegated to the Federal
Government.

Well-informed men still remembered that, in the Convention which framed
the Constitution, a proposition was made to authorize the employment of
force against a delinquent State, on which Mr. Madison remarked that
"the use of force against a State would look more like a declaration of
war than an infliction of punishment, and would probably be considered
by the party attacked as a dissolution of all previous compacts by which
it might have been bound." The Convention expressly refused to confer
the power proposed, and the clause was lost. While, therefore, in 1860,
many violent men, appealing to passion and the lust of power, were
inciting the multitude, and preparing Northern opinion to support a war
waged against the Southern States in the event of their secession, there
were others who took a different view of the case. Notable among such
was the "New York Tribune," which had been the organ of the
abolitionists, and which now declared that, "if the cotton States wished
to withdraw from the Union, they should be allowed to do so"; that "any
atte