CHAPTER V

AMERICAN NATIONALIZATION, AND HOW IT MADE THE BOND OF UNION STRONGER AND STRONGER

Greece was going down in her contest with Macedon when she gave the world to come the Achæan league, the first historical example of full-grown federation. As Freeman says of such a federal government: "Its perfect form is a late growth of a very high state of political culture."[27] This historian thus summarizes its essentials:

"Two requisites seem necessary to constitute federal government in this its most perfect form. On the one hand, each of the members of the union must be wholly independent in those matters which concern each member only. On the other hand, all must be subject to a common power in those matters which concern the whole body of members collectively."[28]

No author has yet shown a better-considered and more accurate appreciation of the benefits to different communities of federal union. But the islander could not conceive--even at the centre of the British empire spread over the world--the advanced phase of Anglo-Saxon federation in America and Australia, which for want of a better name we may call, using a grand word of our fathers, continental federation.

And Americans of every generation have misunderstood the true nature of our union, and especially how it was made and how it could be unmade. The fathers were as much mistaken as to the real authorship of the declaration of independence, the articles of confederation, and the federal constitution, as Burke and many people of his time were as to the true causes of the French revolution, or as the brothers were as to those of their war. In all that the fathers did they were sure that they acted as agents solely of their respective colonies or States, which they believed to be independent and sovereign. Therefore they maintained that the authorship of the three great documents just mentioned was that of the separate States, when in truth it was that of the union. When the latter, which had been long forming its rudiments, came into something like consciousness, it at once spurred our fathers to make the declaration of independence. The declaration corresponds to the later ordinances of secession. And this union, gathering strength, led our fathers to make the old confederation; and its articles and the belonging government are closely paralleled by the constitution of the Confederate States and its belonging government. As southern nationalization brought forth the southern confederacy, so it was American nationalization that caused secession from England, the declaration of independence, and the confederation which won the Revolutionary war. To summarize the foregoing: Southern nationalization evolved the southern union, and American nationalization evolved the American union. The fathers, with the usual undiscernment of contemporaries, by a most natural _hysteron proteron_ conceived the latter union to be the work, product, and result of the constitution. In the intersectional contention, the south accepted the mistakes of the fathers and rested her cause upon them, and the north, instead of correcting them, substituted a huge and glaring mistake of her own. Advocating the maintenance of the constitution over all the States, she sought to refute the doctrine of State sovereignty urged by the south with the arguments of those who had opposed the adoption of the federal constitution. Patrick Henry and Nathan Dane--we omit the others--argued that the constitution, if ratified, would really wipe out State lines and make the central government supreme in authority over the States, and actually sovereign. Could the people of the thirteen States have been made to believe this, they would have unanimously rejected the instrument. Washington, Hamilton, Madison, and many others competent to advise, stood in solid phalanx on the other side, and the people were convinced by them that adoption would have no such effect. They decided that the arguments were not good, and the constitution was ratified. But the discredited arguments were afterwards, by a very queer psychological process, taken up by Story, Webster, and a great host, and paraded as unanswerable refutation of the doctrine of State sovereignty, and demonstration that by the constitution the United States had acquired absolute supremacy over the different States.[29] At a later place we will try to show you how Webster's glory outshines that of every other actor, except Lincoln, in the great struggle between north and south. But here we must emphasize how, when supporting the fallacies of Patrick Henry and Nathan Dane, he met the one real and signal defeat of his life, to which the drubbing he received from Binney in the Girard College case was a small affair--a defeat none the less signal because at the time, and long afterwards, it was and still is crowned as a glorious victory by thousands upon thousands.

The force-bill had just been introduced into the senate of the United States. It provided for the collection of the revenue in defiance of the nullification ordinance of South Carolina. The next day, January 22, 1833, Calhoun offered in that body his famous resolutions, embodying his doctrine of nullification, under which he justified the ordinance just mentioned. The 16th of the next month, Webster discussed the two cardinal ones of these resolutions at length. As he summarized them, they affirmed:

"1. That the political system under which we live, and under which congress is now assembled, is a compact, to which the people of the several States, as separate and sovereign communities, are the parties.

2. That these sovereign parties have a right to judge, each for itself, of any alleged violation of the constitution by congress; and in case of such violation, to choose, each for itself, its own mode and measure of redress."

He had not long before contemplated making an address to the public in answer to Calhoun's pro-nullification letter to Governor Hamilton in the form of a letter from himself to Kent; and it cannot be doubted that he had got himself ready for this; nor can it be doubted that in the twenty-five days' interim he had not only worked over and adapted the unused materials of the address mentioned, but he had most diligently made special preparation for his speech--in short, it may be assumed that he had bestowed upon the subject of the resolutions the most searching examination and profound meditation of which, with his superhuman powers, he was capable. In spite of all his conscientious labors, as I am now especially concerned to impress upon you, he injured and set back the cause of the union by defending it with answerable arguments--nay, rather, with arguments helping the other side.

At the outset he severely and sternly rebukes two terms of Calhoun's, one being the use of _constitutional compact_ for _constitution_, and the other being _the accession of a State to the constitution_. These terms are utterly impermissible, and are to be scouted. If we accept them, _we must acquiesce in the monstrous conclusions which the author of the resolutions draws from them_. That is really what Webster says. Note the confident positiveness of his pertinent language, some of which we subjoin:

"It is easy, quite easy, to see why the honorable gentleman has used it [constitutional compact] in these resolutions. He cannot open the book, and look upon our written frame of government, without seeing that it is called a _constitution_. This may well be appalling to him. It threatens his whole doctrine of compact, and its darling derivatives, nullification and secession, with instant confutation. Because, if he admits our instrument of government to be a _constitution_, then, for that very reason, it is not a compact between sovereigns; a constitution of government and a compact between sovereign powers being things essentially unlike in their very natures, and incapable of ever being the same.

We know no more of a constitutional compact between sovereign powers than we know of a _constitutional_ indenture of copartnership, a _constitutional_ bill of exchange. But we know what the _constitution_ is; we know what the bond of our union and the security of our liberties is; and we mean to maintain and to defend it, in its plain sense and unsophisticated meaning."

This is enough of the exorcism of that malignant spirit, constitutional compact. Now as to the other malignant spirit. Webster says:

"The first resolution declares that the people of the several States '_acceded_' to the constitution, or to the constitutional compact, as it is called. This word 'accede,' not found either in the constitution itself, or in the ratification of it by any one of the States, has been chosen for use here, doubtless, not without a well-considered purpose.

The natural converse of _accession_ is _secession_; and, therefore, when it is stated that the people of the States acceded to the union, it may be more plausibly argued that they may secede from it. _If in adopting the constitution, nothing was done but acceding to a compact, nothing would seem necessary to break it up, but to secede from the same compact._ But the term is wholly out of place.... The people of the United States have used no such form of expression in establishing the present government. They do not say that they _accede_ to a league, but they declare that they _ordain and establish_ a constitution. Such are the very words of the instrument itself; and in all the States, without exception, the language used by their conventions was, that they '_ratified_ the constitution;' some of them employing the additional words 'assented to' and 'adopted,' but all of them 'ratifying.'"

Note that I have italicized in the quotation certain admissions of Webster, which, in case his premises should be disproved, concede the cause to his adversary. And we will now tell you how Calhoun did disprove those premises.

He showed that Webster himself had in a senate speech called the constitution a _constitutional compact_; and that President Washington, in his official announcement to congress, described North Carolina as _acceding_ to the union by the ratification she had at last made of the constitution.

As to these two points Calhoun further sustained himself with unquestionable authority and also argument inconfutable by one who, like Webster, did not find the true _ratio decidendi_, that is, the effect of evolution to bring forth the nation.

The rest of Calhoun's answer will be considered a little later. But what of it has already been given covers the essentials of the controversy. In supporting his proposition that the States were sovereign when they made the constitution, and kept their entire sovereignty intact afterwards, he was too strong for his antagonist. And yet had his knowledge of the facts been fuller, how much better he could have done. He could have quoted from all the great men who made the constitution and secured its ratification language, in which _accede_ is used again and again in the same sense as it is in his resolutions.

Likewise, he could have quoted language in which they designated the constitution as a compact or something synonymous. Madison--to mention only one of many instances--advocating ratification in the Virginia convention, called the constitution "a government of _a federal nature_, consisting of _many coequal sovereignties_." What an effective _argumentum ad hominem_ could Calhoun have found in the provision of the constitution of the State of Webster, to wit: that Massachusetts is free, sovereign, and independent, retaining every power which she has not expressly delegated to the United States.[30]

Webster also made blunders in construing the context of the constitution, as well as the clauses specially involved, in contrasting the constitution with the articles of confederation, and in his reading of our constitutional history. These blunders were exhaustively, ably, relentlessly exposed.

We who are trained either in forensic or parliamentary debate well know the conquering and demolishing reply. Although, as we have just shown, Calhoun's reply could have been far more effective than it really was, still its success and triumph were so evident that when he closed, John Randolph, who had heard it, wanted a hat obstructing his sight removed, so that, as he said, he might see "Webster die, muscle by muscle."

Master the question at issue, and read the two speeches as impartially as you strive to read the discussion of Æschines and Demosthenes, and if you are qualified to judge of debate between intellectual giants you must admit that Webster was driven from every inch of ground chosen by him as his very strongest, and which he confidently believed that he could hold against the world.

Yet the union men, who were hosts in the north and numerous even in the south at that time, accepted Webster's speech as the bible of their political faith, and as its reward ennobled him with the pre-eminent title of Expounder of the Constitution. They ignored, or they never learned of, the pulverizing refutation. But the State-rights men and the south generally understood. Webster also understood. He did not make any real rejoinder. And his subsequent utterances are in harmony with the State-rights doctrine to which Calhoun seems to have converted him.[31] I fancy that with that rare humor which was one of his shining gifts, he dubbed himself in his secret meditations, "Expounder because not expounding." Later I shall tell you how Webster builded better than he knew, and that there was, after all, in the speech that which fully justifies the worship it received from the union men.

But there is something else pertinent to be learned here. That the north generally found out only what Webster said in the debate for his side, and never even heard of what was said on the other, and that the south became at once familiar with both speeches, proves that each section had already formed its own belonging and independent public, and that the southern public kept attentive watch upon all affairs of fact or opinion interesting the other, while the northern public knew hardly anything at all of the south. A large percentage of the southern leaders had studied in northern schools and colleges. In this and many other ways they had been instructed as to the north. Such instruction contributed very greatly to southern supremacy in the federal government until the election of Lincoln. We can now see that the powers in charge, as a part of their work, made the great northern public, which, as Lincoln observed, was to be the savior of the union, stop its ears to all anti-union sentiments or arguments. How else can you understand it that the ante-bellum notices of Webster, the memoir by Everett, the different utterances of Choate, and many, many other sketches, are so utterly dumb as to Calhoun's great reply? And is not the same dumbness of Curtis, Von Holst, and McMaster, writing after the war, due to the survival in the north of the old constraint? a constraint so powerful that, while Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge, in 1883, did concede just a little to Calhoun, he stopped far short of the full justice that I believe he would now render were he to traverse the ground again.

We must now go beyond what we have already hinted, and show you plainly how both the union men and the State-rights men assumed untenable premises, and how the south, maintaining a cause foredoomed, vanquished in the forum of discussion her adversary, maintaining the side which fate had decreed must win. In no other way can the reader be better made to understand the incalculable potency of the forces which preserved the American union after its orators and advocates had all been discomfited; and in no other way can he better learn what principles are to be invoked if he would grasp the real essence of the union.

We emphasize the material and cardinal mistake of the union men, thus phrased by Webster in the speech we have discussed: "Whether the constitution be a compact between States in their sovereign capacities, is a question which must be mainly argued from what is contained in the instrument itself."

This was to abandon inexpugnable ground. That ground was the great body of pertinent facts, known to all, which begun the making of the union before the declaration of independence, and which, from that time on to the very hour that Webster was speaking, had been making the union stronger and more perfect. He ought to have contended that a nation grows; that it cannot be made, or be at all modified, even by a constitution. Any constitution is its creature, not its creator.

How weak he was when he invoked construction of the federal constitution as the main umpire. That constitution had been always construed against him. The three departments of the federal government had each uniformly treated it as a compact between sovereign States; and they kept this up until the brothers' war broke out. Mr. Stephens, in his great compilation,[32] demonstrates this unanswerably. But the State-rights men had a still greater strength than even this, if the question be conceded to be one of construction. As the author of the Republic of Republics shows by a mountain of proofs, the illustrious draftsmen of the constitution and their contemporaries who finally got the constitution adopted--all the people, high and low, who favored the cause--declared at the time that the sovereignty of the States would remain unimpaired after adoption.[33]

To sum up, the generation that drafted and adopted the constitution, and all the succeeding ones who had lived under it, agreed that the States were sovereign.

How could even Webster talk these facts out of existence? At every stage of the intersectional debate the cause of the south supporting State sovereignty became stronger. And there were great hosts at the north who understood the record as the south did; and, while they hoped and prayed that separation would never come, they conscientiously conceded State sovereignty to the full. It seems to me to be the fact that, although the federal soldiers cherished deep love for the union, a very great majority of the more intelligent among them did not long keep at its height the emotion excited by the attack on Fort Sumter, and soon settled back into their former creed, holding, because of the reasons summarized above, the States to be sovereign; and while they thought it supreme folly in the south to set up the confederacy, they still believed that to do so was but the exercise of an indubitable right of the States creating it. From what I saw at the time, and the many proofs that appeared to accumulate upon me afterwards, this explains the unprecedented panic with which the federal army abandoned the field at the First Manassas. Consider just a moment. The federal army, giving the confederates a complete surprise, turns their position and drives them back in rout. The confederates make an unexpected stand, fight for some hours, and at last, assuming the offensive, win the field. The troops on each side practically all raw volunteers, very much alike in race and character. But the federals had much more than two to one engaged, as is demonstrated by the fact that the confederates had only twenty-five regiments of infantry in action, and they took prisoners from fifty-five. The more one who, like me, observed much of the war, thinks it over, the more clearly he sees that the flight from Manassas is not to be explained because of the superior courage and stamina of the southern soldiers. I believe that the union men, observing how brave and death-defying their brothers on the other side were in facing disaster that seemed irretrievable and odds irresistible, at last became convinced that these brothers, defending home and firesides, were right, and that they themselves, invading an inviolably sovereign State, were heinously wrong; and thus awakened conscience made cowards of all these gallant men. And it is thoroughly established, I believe, that everywhere in the first engagements of the war, the southern volunteers, if they were commanded by a fighter, showed far more spirit and stomach than their adversaries. In the amicable meetings, often occurring upon the picket line, when we confederates would with good humor ask the union men how it was that we won so many fights, it was a stereotyped reply of the latter, "Why, you are fighting for your country and we only for $13 a month." It was but natural that, by reason of what has been told in the foregoing, the south unanimously, and a very large number at the north, should believe any State could under its reserved powers rightfully secede from the union whenever and for whatever cause it pleased.

We see now what the angry brothers did not see. The absolute sovereignty of the States, and the right of secession both _de facto_ and _de jure_ could have been conceded, and at the same time the war for the union justified. The unionists could well have said to the south:

"Your independence is too great a menace to our interests to be tolerated, and the high duty of self-defence commands that we resist to the death. The _status quo_ is better for us all. Now that you have set up for yourself, we must tell you, sadly but firmly, that if you do not come back voluntarily, we must resort to coercion,--not under the constitution, for you have thrown that off, but under the law of nations to which you have just subjected yourself."

The man who of all southerners has given State sovereignty its most learned and able defence--Sage, the author of "The Republic of Republics"--says: "To coerce a state is unconstitutional; but it is equally true that the precedent of coercing states is established, and that it is defensible under the law of nations."[34]

To have received the confederate commissioners as representing an independent nation, and made demand that the seceding States return to the union, would have been a far stronger theory than that on which the war was avowedly waged; for it would have taken from the south that superiority in the argument which had given her great prestige in Europe, and even in the north. And lastly, under the law of nations, the federal government, after coercing the seceding States back, would have had--even according to the theory of State rights as maintained in the south--perfectly legitimate power to abolish slavery. The statement that emancipation was "sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the constitution, upon military necessity," protests so much that one sees that the highly conscientious man hesitated and doubted. And well may he have doubted; for what warrant can be found in the constitution for destroying that property which it solemnly engaged to defend and protect as a condition precedent of its adoption?--that is, if the southern States were still in the union and under the constitution, as was claimed by all who justified the proclamation? But if the southern States had gone out of the union, they had revoked their ratification and had thrown away all the protection of slavery given by the constitution; and while the constitution did not direct how the federal government should act in the matter, the law of nations gave full and ample directions. Its authority was not stinted nor hampered by any rights recognized in the constitution as reserved to the States under it. The subsequent amendment, imposed as a condition of reconstruction, shows that the people of the north seriously questioned if slavery had been abolished by the proclamation and its enforcement by the union armies.

But this, strong as it was, would not have been the true theory. The true theory--the real fact--is that at the outbreak of the brothers' war, and long before, the States had become more closely connected than the Siamese Twins,--indissolubly united as integral parts of the same organism, like the different trunks of the Banyan tree; and while the southern nationalization was opposing the union forces with might and main, it was really but an excrescence, with roots far more shallow than those of the American union--a parasite like the mistletoe, growing upon the American body politic, fated to die of itself if not destroyed by its fell foe. For, as we have explained, the sole motor of this southern nationalization--slavery--could no more maintain itself permanently against free labor than the handloom could stand against the steam-loom, or the draft-horse can much longer compete with artificial traction power.

Now let us rapidly set in array the stronger supports of this true theory. We should start with the impulse to combine which adjacency always gives to communities of the same origin; and external compression and joint interest to those of diverse origin, as we see in the case of the Swiss. How clearly does our great American sociologist trace the effect of this impulse in ancient society. First a body of consanguinei grows into a gens; after a while, neighboring gentes of the same stock-language form a tribe; then neighboring tribes, as some of the Iroquois and Aztecs, form a confederacy. At this point the development of the American Indians was arrested by the coming of the whites. "A coalescence of tribes into a nation had not occurred in any case in any part of America," says the great authority.[35] But we can easily understand what would have occurred had the Indians been left to themselves. They would have passed out of the nomadic state into settlements of fixed abodes, local and geographical political divisions evolving from the old gentes and tribes, the contiguous ones often uniting. History furnishes many examples of neighboring communities coalescing into nations. One of the most remarkable of all is the environment which has constrained peoples of four different languages to coalesce into the little Swiss nation. Turning away from prehistoric times and also ancient history, let the student re-enforce the case of the Swiss, just alluded to, with the modern nation-making in Italy and Germany. These few of the many instances which can be given show how and what sorts of adjacent communities are prone to co-operate or combine for a common purpose, and how such combination develops at last an irresistible proneness to national union. Drops of liquid in proximity to one another on a plane may long maintain each their independent forms; but bring them into actual contact, and presto! all the globules have coalesced into a single mass. After the belonging part of the evolutionary science of sociology has been fully developed--which time does not seem very far off--the subject will receive adequate illustration. Then all of us will understand that, many years before Alamance and Lexington, the colonies, in their defence of themselves against the Indians and the French, in their intercommunication over innumerable matters of joint interest, in the beneficent example of the Iroquois confederacy and the advice of our fathers by the Iroquois, as early as 1755, to form one of the colonies similar to their own,[36] and in many other things that can be suggested, were steadily becoming one people, and more and more predisposed to political union. We shall also see, much more clearly than we do yet, that the Revolutionary war, by keeping them some years under a general government, imparted new and powerful impetus to the nationalizing forces, which were working none the less surely because unobserved. Our lesson will be completely learned when we recognize that about the time the war with the mother country commenced the globules, that is, the separate colonies, had become actually a quasi-political whole,--a stage of evolution so near to that of full nationality that it is hard to distinguish the two. It seems to me that the nation had come at least into rudimentary existence when the declaration of independence was made. Surely from that time on something wondrously like a _de facto_ national union of the old colonies grew rapidly, and became stronger and stronger; and this to me is the sufficient and only explanation of the seismic popular upheaval that displaced the weaker government under the articles of confederation with one endowed by the federal constitution with ample powers to administer the affairs of the nation now beginning to stir with consciousness. And yet so blind was everybody that in 1787 the delegates and their constituents all believed the convention to be the organ of the States, when in truth it was the organ of the new American nation. Prompted by a self-preserving instinct, this nationality deftly kept itself hid. Had it been disclosed, the federal constitution could not have been adopted; and had a suspicion of it come a few years later, there would have been successful secession. And so each State dreamed on its sweet dream of dominion until the call to the stars and stripes rang through the north. Then its people began darkly and dimly to discern the nationalization which had united the States and become a hoop of adamant to hold the union forever stanch. Of course to the south nothing appeared but the State sovereignty of the fathers. Her illuded sight was far clearer and more confident than the true vision of the north, and she magnified State sovereignty which she thought she saw, and damned the American nationality preached by the north as anti-State-rights, when at that very time a nationality of her own had really put all the southern States at its feet. It mattered not for the thick perception of the north and the optical illusion of the south, the American nation was now full grown; and by the result of the brothers' war it made good its claim to sovereignty.

The historian must accurately gauge the effect wrought by the wonderfully successful career of the United States under the federal constitution in its first years. War with France imminent, Pinckney's winged word, "Millions for defence, but not a cent for tribute," the sword buckled on again by the father of his country--and peace; the extension of our domain from the Mississippi to the Pacific by the Louisiana purchase; the victories won against the men who used to say scornfully that our fathers could not stand the bayonet, and the still more surprising victories won with an improvised navy against the mistress of the seas, in the war of 1812; the brilliant operations of Decatur against Algiers; the military power of the Indians decisively and permanently outclassed, until soon our women and children on the border were practically secure against the tomahawk and scalping knife; and perhaps above all the world-wide spaciousness, as it were, and the inexpressibly greater dignity and splendor of the public arena, as compared with that of any single colony or State, which was opened at once to every ambitious spirit--these are some, only, of the feats and achievements which gave the United States unquestioned authority at home and incomparable prestige around the world. And on and on the American nation rushed, from one stage of growth into and through another, until the result was that for some years before secession State sovereignty, for all of the high airs it gave itself and the imposing show of respect it extorted, had become merely a survival.

Thus did the American nation form, from a number of different neighboring, cognate, and very closely-akin communities, under that complex of the forces of growth and those of combination which imperceptibly and resistlessly steers the social organism along the entire track of its evolution. The nationalizing leaven was hidden by the powers in charge of our national destiny in the colonial meal, and it had in time so completely leavened the whole lump that Rhode Island, and North Carolina, trying hard to stay out, and Texas desporting joyfully and proudly under the lone star in her golden independence, could not break the invisible leading strings, which pulled all three into the United States. Note how Oregon and California, though largely settled from the south yet being without slavery, in their extreme remoteness from the brothers' war adhered to the union cause. And had the southern confederacy triumphed in the war, the States in it would have staid out of the federal union only the few years necessary for slavery to run its course. When there was no more virgin soil for cotton, the southern nation, which was merely a growth upon the American nation, would have collapsed of itself, as did the State of Frankland; and that continental brotherhood which brought in Rhode Island, North Carolina, and Texas, would have commandingly reasserted itself. The more you contemplate the facts, the more it is seen that this continental brotherhood was and is the most vigorous tap-root and stock of nationality in all history. The providence which at first gradually and surely mixed the colonies into one people, then into a feeble and infirm political whole, rapidly hardening in consistency, and lastly into an indissoluble union, and which was from the beginning more and more developing us into a nation--this overruling evolution, and not constitution or lawmaking organs, has been, is, and always will be the ultimate and supreme authority, the opposeless lawgiver, the resistlessly self-executing higher law in America, creating, altering, modifying or abolishing man-made constitutions, laws, ordinances, and statutes, as suits its own true democratic purpose, often inscrutable to contemporaries.

The foregoing is the substance of the argument that must now take the place of that made by Webster and the unionists after him, which was convincingly confuted by the south. It proves the complete and immaculate justice of the war for the union.

This view differs from the other, which we admitted above to be very strong, mainly in refusing to concede that a State is sovereign and can legitimately secede at will. But under it, it ought to be conceded that the States in the southern confederacy were for the time actually out of the American union by revolution. It is not possible to say they were in rebellion; that is an offence of individuals standing by an authority hastily improvised and manifestly sham. It was not by the action of individuals, but it was by the action of States, veritable political entities and quasi sovereigns, that the confederacy was organized. When these States were coerced back, they could not invoke the protection to their slaves given in a constitution which they had solemnly repudiated. The United States could therefore deal with them as it had with the Territories from which it excluded slavery. While of course adequate protection of the freedmen against their former masters ought to have been provided, it should at the same time have been made clear to the world that slavery was abolished solely because events had demonstrated it to be the only root and cause of dismemberment of the union. Such a familiar example as the often-exercised power of a municipality to blow up a house, without compensation therefor, to stop the progress of conflagration, and many other seemingly arbitrary acts done by society in its self-preservation, would have occurred to conscientious people contemplating. And it would have been a long flight in morals above the proclamation, merely to have justified emancipation on the ground that the existence of slavery was a serious menace to the life of the nation.

One's logic may be often wrong, and yet his proposition has been rightly given him by an instinct, as we so often see in the case of good women. O this subliminal self of ours, how it bends us hither and thither, as the solid hemisphere does the little human figure upon it, posing with a seeming will of his own! Hence, and not from our argument-making faculty, come not only our own most important principles of action, but also our very strongest persuasive influence. And it is the subconscious mental forces moving great masses of men and women all the same way--that is, the national instincts--which are the all-conquering powers that the apostle of a good cause arouses and sets in array. And while it is true that the mere logic of Webster's anti-nullification speech is puerile, the after world will more and more couple that speech with the reply to Hayne, and keep the two at the top--above every effort of all other orators. In the reply to Hayne, in 1830, he had magnified the union in a passage which ever since has deservedly led all selections for American speech books. And now, in 1833, when dismemberment actually makes menace of its ugly self, the great wizard of speech that takes consciences and hearts captive,[37] proclaimed to his countrymen that there could be no such thing as lawful secession or nullification. The earnestness and the emphasis with which he said this were supreme merits of the speech. And thenceforth it was enough to the hosts of the north to remember that the American, towering like a mountain above them all, had in his high place solemnly declared that secession is necessarily revolution. And, to one who is familiar with the hypnotizing effect of subconscious national suggestion it is not strange that they scouted Calhoun's demolishing reply, and treasured Webster's false logic as supreme and perfect exposition of the constitution.