and public enemies; perjury,
treason, and rebellion are commonly held to be crimes; and who ever
heard, before, that criminals were restored to all the rights of honest
citizens by the mere fact of their arrest?

The doctrine, moreover, is a worse heresy than that of Secession; for
Secession implies that seceded States, being out of the Union, can
plainly only be brought back by conquest, and on such terms as the
victors may choose to impose. No candid Southern Rebel, who believes
that his State seceded, and that he acted under competent authority when
he took up arms against the United States, can have the effrontery to
affirm that he had inherent rights of citizenship in "the foreign
country" against which he plotted and fought for four years. The
so-called "right" of secession was claimed by the South as a
constitutional right, to be peaceably exercised, but it passed into the
broader and more generally intelligible "right" of revolution when it
had to be sustained by war; and the condition of a defeated
revolutionist is certainly not that of a qualified voter in the nation
against which he revolted. But if insurgent States recover their former
rights and privileges when they submit to superior force, there is no
reason why armed rebellion should not be as common as local discontent.
We have, on this principle, sacrificed thirty-five hundred millions of
dollars and three hundred thousand lives, only to bring the insurgent
States into just those "practical relations to the Union" which will
enable us to sacrifice thirty-five hundred millions of dollars more, and
three hundred thousand more lives, when it suits the passions and
caprices of these States to rebel again. Whatever they may do in the way
of disturbing the peace of the country, they can never, it seems,
forfeit their rights and privileges under the Constitution. Even if
everybody was positively certain that there would be a new rebellion in
ten years, unless conditions of representation were exacted of the
South, we still, according to the doctrine of the Johnsonian jurists,
would be constitutionally impotent to exact them, because insurgent
States recover unconditioned rights to representation by the mere fact
of their submitting to the power they can no longer resist. The
acceptance of this principle would make insurrection the chronic disease
of our political system. War would follow war, until nearly all the
wealth of the country was squandered, and near