entiment.

On the other hand _American_ national sentiment was a reality. It had
been baptized in blood. It was a reality for Southerners as well as for
Northerners, for Secessionists as well as for Union men. There was
probably no American, outside South Carolina, who did not feel it as a
reality, though it might be temporarily obscured and overborne by local
loyalties, angers, and fears. The President of the Confederacy had
himself fought under the Stars and Stripes, and loved it so well that he
could not bear to part with it and wished to retain it as the flag of
the South. Had one generation of excited men, without any cognate and
definable grievance, moved only by anger at a political reverse and the
dread of unrealized and dubious evils, the right to undo the mighty work
of consolidation now so nearly accomplished, to throw away at once the
inheritance of their fathers and the birthright of their children? Nor
would they and their children be the only losers: it was the great
principles on which the American Commonwealth was built that seemed to
many to be on trial for their life. If the Union were broken up, what
could men say but that Democracy had failed? The ghost of Hamilton might
grin from his grave; though his rival had won the laurel, it was he who
would seem to have proved his case. For the first successful secession
would not necessarily have been the last. The thesis of State
Sovereignty established by victory in arms--which always does in
practice establish any thesis for good or evil--meant the break-up of
the free and proud American nation into smaller and smaller fragments as
new disputes arose, until the whole fabric planned by the Fathers of the
Republic had disappeared. It is impossible to put this argument better
than in the words of Lincoln himself. "Must a government, of necessity,
be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to
maintain its own existence?" That was the issue as he saw it, an issue
which he was determined should be decided in the negative, even at the
cost of a long and bloody Civil War.

I have endeavoured to state fairly the nature of the conflict of wills
which was to produce Civil War, and to explain how each side justified
morally its appeal to arms. Further than that I do not think it
necessary to go. But I will add just this one historical fact which, I
think, supplies some degree of further justification for the attitude of
the North--that concerning