ends, by the admission of his partisans, to attempt a _coup d'etat_
on the assembling of the Fortieth Congress, in case seventy-one members
of the House of Representatives, favorable to his policy, are chosen, in
the elections of this autumn, from the twenty-six loyal States. These,
with the fifty Southern delegates, would constitute a quorum of the
House; and the remaining hundred and nineteen members are, in the
President's favorite phrase, "to be kicked out" from that "verge" of the
government on which they now are said to be "hanging." The question,
therefore, whether Congress, as it is at present constituted, is a body
constitutionally competent to legislate for the whole country, is the
most important of all practical questions. Let us see how the case
stands.

The Constitution, ratified by the people of all the States, establishes
a government of sovereign powers, supreme over the whole land, and the
people of no State can rightly pass from under its authority except by
the consent of the people of all the States, with whom it is bound by
the most solemn and binding of contracts. The Rebel States broke, _in
fact_, the contract they could not break _in right_. Assembled in
conventions of their people, they passed ordinances of secession,
withdrew their Senators and Representatives from Congress, and began the
war by assailing a fort of the United States. The Secessionists had
trusted to the silence of the Constitution in relation to the act they
performed. A State in the American Union, as distinguished from a
Territory, is constitutionally a part of the government to which it owes
allegiance, and the seceded States had refused to be parts of the
government, and had forsworn their allegiance. By the Constitution, the
United States, in cases of "domestic violence" in a State, is to
interfere, "on application of the Legislature, or of the Executive when
the Legislature cannot be convened." But in this case legislatures,
executives, conventions of the people, were all violators of the
domestic peace, and of course made no application for interference. By
the Constitution, Congress is empowered to suppress insurrections; but
this might be supposed to mean insurrections like Shays's Rebellion in
Massachusetts and the Whiskey Insurrection in Pennsylvania, and not to
cover the action of States seceding from the Congress which is thus
empowered. The seceders, therefore, felt somewhat as did the absconding
James II. when h