ime will be worth more to the world than ten
times the men and ten times the money. The evidence reaching us from the
country leaves no doubt that the material for the work is abundant, and
that it needs only the hand of legislation to give it legal sanction and
the hand of the Executive to give it practical shape and efficiency. One
of the greatest perplexities of the Government is to avoid receiving
troops faster than it can provide for them. In a word, the people will
save their Government if the Government itself will do its part only
indifferently well.

It might seem at first thought to be of little difference whether the
present movement at the South be called "secession" or "rebellion." The
movers, however, well understand the difference. At the beginning they
knew they could never raise their treason to any respectable magnitude
by any name which implies _violation_ of law. They knew their people
possessed as much of moral sense, as much of devotion to law and order,
and as much pride in and reverence for the history and Government of
their common country as any other civilized and patriotic people. They
knew they could make no advancement directly in the teeth of these
strong and noble sentiments. Accordingly, they commenced by an insidious
debauching of the public mind. They invented an ingenious sophism,
which, if conceded, was followed by perfectly logical steps through all
the incidents to the complete destruction of the Union. The sophism
itself is that any State of the Union may _consistently_ with the
National Constitution, and therefore _lawfully_ and _peacefully_,
withdraw from the Union without the consent of the Union or of any other
State. The little disguise that the supposed right is to be exercised
only for just cause, themselves to be the sole judge of its justice,
is too thin to merit any notice.

With rebellion thus sugar coated they have been drugging the public mind
of their section for more than thirty years, and until at length they
have brought many good men to a willingness to take up arms against the
Government the day _after_ some assemblage of men have enacted the
farcical pretense of taking their State out of the Union who could have
been brought to no such thing the day _before_.

This sophism derives much, perhaps the whole, of its currency from the
assumption that there is some omnipotent and sacred supremacy pertaining
to a _State_--to each State of our Federal Union. Our Stat