license. The political liberty of
our time, testing the truth of our representative democracy, is
constitutional liberty. It presupposes an organic law, giving force and
effect to it: and without this organic law, liberty is a delusion and a
dream--a vague unsubstantiality. Liberty is like the lightning. To be
made an agent of man's political salvation, it must be brought down from
its home in the clouds, and put under the restraints and checks of
institutions. The institutions protect it; it sanctifies the
institutions. In its unchecked power, like the lightning, it annihilates
and overwhelms man. Unchecked, it becomes a reckless license, disgracing
history and its own fair name with such scenes as the French Revolution,
and causing the martyred defenders of its sacred majesty to cry out, in
bitter agony of disappointment: 'O Liberty, what crimes are committed in
thy name!'

In fact, the liberty that is valuable is the liberty that is regulated
by law; just as the law that is valuable is the law that has the spirit
of liberty. This is the American doctrine of constitutional liberty, as
it has ever been expounded by our great statesmen and orators; and it
commends itself to the sound sense of all reflecting men.

In seeking, therefore, to subvert our Constitution, the South attack the
principle of liberty, which is the basis of it, and which it guarantees.
More than this, they attack the principle of constitutional liberty; for
their secession is in virtue of that unchecked liberty which is license,
that absolute liberty which is anarchy. They are not contending for the
sacred right of revolution. It is treason against that majestic
principle to apply it to the cause of the South. They were not
oppressed; they were not even controlled by a dominant party opposed to
them; their will was almost law, for it made our laws. According to the
_theory_ of our Constitution, they possessed equal rights with all other
sections of the Union; under the _practice_ of it, and in _fact_, they
had gradually come to possess and were actually wielding greater power
than all other sections. It is thus seen how vain and absurd is the plea
that they were driven into revolution to redress wrongs, or that they
revolted and seceded for the purpose of preserving rights. Their rights
were neither actually assailed, nor were likely to be assailed. The
protest of that eminent statesman of the South who afterward ('oh, what
a fall was there, my co