the Federal Government or the remaining
States to decide for themselves, whether they will permit a State to
go out of the Union, and remain as a separate and independent State, or
whether they will attempt to force her back at the point of the bayonet.
That is a question, I presume, of policy and expediency, which will be
considered by the remaining States composing the Federal Government,
through their organ, the Federal Government, whenever the contingency
arises.

But, sir, while a State has no power, under the Constitution, conferred
upon it to secede from the Federal Government or from the Union, each
State has the right of revolution, which all admit. Whenever the burdens
of the government under which it acts become so onerous that it cannot
bear them, or if anticipated evil shall be so great that the
State believes it would be better off--even risking the perils of
secession--out of the Union than in it, then that State, in my
opinion, like all people upon earth has the right to exercise the
great fundamental principle of self-preservation, and go out of the
Union--though, of course, at its own peril--and bear the risk of the
consequences. And while no State may have the constitutional right to
secede from the Union, the President may not be wrong when he says the
Federal Government has no power under the Constitution to compel the
State to come back into the Union. It may be a _casus omissus_ in the
Constitution; but I should like to know where the power exists in the
Constitution of the United States to authorize the Federal Government
to coerce a sovereign State. It does not exist in terms, at any rate, in
the Constitution. I do not think there is any inconsistency, therefore,
between the two positions of the President in the message upon these
particular points.

The only fault I have to find with the message of the President, is the
inconsistency of another portion. He declares that, as the States have
no power to secede, the Federal Government is in fact a consolidated
government; that it is not a voluntary association of States. I deny it.
It was a voluntary association of States. No State was ever forced to
come into the Federal Union. Every State came voluntarily into it.
It was an association, a voluntary association of States; and the
President's position that it is not a voluntary association is, in my
opinion, altogether wrong.

But whether that be so or not, the President declares and assumes th