e nation, at first by the withdrawal
of their separate States, to be followed by the organization of a
Southern Confederacy. Their grievance was the restriction of their
industrial system, and its threatened destruction, and the failure of
the Union to serve its proper ends of justice and fraternity. But they
wholly disclaimed any revolutionary action. They maintained that the
withdrawal of their States was an exercise of their strictly legal and
constitutional right. This is the plea which is insistently and
strenuously urged by their defenders. Their foremost actors in the
drama, Davis and Stephens, became at a later day its historians, not so
much to record its events, as to plead with elaboration and reiteration
that Secession was a constitutional right. But all their fine-spun
reasoning ran dead against a force which it could no more overcome than
King Canute's words could halt the tide,--the fact of American unity, as
realized in the hearts of the American people.

The mass of men live not by logic, but by primal instincts and passions.
Where one man could explain why the nation was an indestructible
organism rather than a partnership dissoluble at will, a thousand men
could and would fight to prevent the nation from being dissolved. But
here and there on this planet is a man who must think things through to
the end, and have a solid reason for what he does. Such a man was
Abraham Lincoln. He never could rest contented till he had worked the
problem out clearly in his own head, and then had stated the answer in
words that the common man could understand. Such an answer to the whole
Secessionist argument, quite apart from the slavery question, he gave in
one brief paragraph of his inaugural. "There is no alternative for
continuing the government but acquiescence on the one side or the other.
If the minority in such a case will secede rather than acquiesce, they
make a precedent which in turn will ruin and divide them; for a minority
of their own will secede from them, whenever a majority refuses to be
controlled by such a minority. For instance, why not any portion of a
new Confederacy, a year or so hence, arbitrarily secede again, precisely
as portions of the present Union now claim to secede from it? All who
cherish disunion sentiments are now being educated to the exact temper
of doing this. Is there such perfect identity of interests among the
States to compose a new Union as to produce harmony only, and prevent