t nowhere has this confusion led to greater absurdity than
in the pretension which has been recently made in the name of State
Rights,--as if it were reasonable to attribute to a technical "State" of
the Union that immortality which belongs to civil society.

From approved authorities it appears that a "State," even in a broader
signification, may lose its life. Mr. Phillimore, in his recent work on
International Law, says:--"A State, like an individual, may die," and
among the various ways, he says, "by its submission and the donation of
itself to another country."[19] But in the case of our Rebel States
there has been a plain submission and donation of
themselves,--_effective, at least, to break the continuity of
government_, if not to destroy that immortality which has been claimed.
Nor can it make any difference, in breaking this continuity, that the
submission and donation, constituting a species of attornment, were to
enemies at home rather than to enemies abroad,--to Jefferson Davis
rather than to Louis Napoleon. The thread is snapped in one case as much
as in the other.

But a _change of form_ in the actual government may be equally
effective. Cicero speaks of a change so complete as "to leave no image
of a State behind." But this is precisely what has been done throughout
the whole Rebel region: there is no image of a _constitutional_ State
left behind. Another authority, Aristotle, whose words are always
weighty, says, that, _the form of the State being changed, the State is
no longer the same_, as the harmony is not the same when we modulate out
of the Dorian mood into the Phrygian. But if ever an unlucky people
modulated out of one mood into another, it was our Rebels, when they
undertook to modulate out of the harmonies of the Constitution into
their bloody discords.

Without stopping further for these diversions, I content myself with the
testimony of Edmund Burke, who, in a striking passage, which seems to
have been written for us, portrays the extinction of a political
community; but I quote his eloquent words rather for suggestion than for
authority:--

"In a state of _rude_ Nature there is no such thing as a people. A
number of men in themselves have no collective capacity. The idea of
people is the idea of a corporation. It is wholly artificial, and made,
like all other legal fictions, by common agreement. What the particular
nature of that agreement was is collected from the form into which the