om 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 judges 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 pretence 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 States have neither
more nor less power than that reserved to them in the Union by the
Constitution, no one of them ever ha