of the smaller States and the preservation of their equality in the
Union, that the compact in regard to the membership of the two Houses of
Congress should not be so amended that any "State, without its consent,
shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate." These
limitations and prohibitions on the power of amendment all refer to
clauses of the Constitution, to things which existed as part of the
General Government; they were not needed, and therefore not to be found
in relation to the reserved powers of the States, on which the General
Government was forbidden to intrude by the ninth article of the
amendments.

In view of the small territory of the New England States, comparatively
to that of the Middle and Southern States, and the probability of the
creation of new States in the large Territory of some of these latter,
it might well have been anticipated that in the course of time the New
England States would become less than one fourth of the members of the
Union. Nothing is less likely than that the watchful patriots of that
region would have consented to a form of government which should give to
a majority of three fourths of the States the power to deprive them of
their dearest rights and privileges. Yet to this extremity the new-born
theory of the power of amendment would go. Against this insidious
assault, this wooden horse which it is threatened to introduce into the
citadel of our liberties, I have sought to warn the inheritors of our
free institutions, and earnestly do invoke the resistance of all true
patriots.

PART III.

SECESSION AND CONFEDERATION.

CHAPTER I.

Opening of the New Year.--The People in Advance of their
Representatives.--Conciliatory Conduct of Southern Members of
Congress.--Sensational Fictions.--Misstatements of the Count of
Paris.--Obligations of a Senator.--The Southern Forts and
Arsenals.--Pensacola Bay and Fort Pickens.--The Alleged "Caucus"
and its Resolutions.--Personal Motives and Feelings.--The
Presidency not a Desirable Office.--Letter from the Hon. C. C.
Clay.

With the failure of the Senate Committee of Thirteen to come to any
agreement, the last reasonable hope of a pacific settlement of
difficulties within the Union was extinguished in the minds of those
most reluctant to abandon the effort. The year 1861 opened, as we have
seen, upon the spectacle of a general belief, among the people of the
planting States, in the n