2. Is this right stronger or weaker in the case of Americans?

3. Is Secession to be considered as rebellion at all?

There are thus three stages. A person who would not admit the right of Naples to throw off the yoke of the Bourbons, might admit that the people of Western Virginia had the right to throw off the government of their State, and set up for themselves, though, of course, it would not follow that President Lincoln had any right to do it for them. And a person who might insist on the inhabitants of the Kanawha Valley being kept under the Richmond Government whether they wished it or not, might still think that it was quite open to that Government to separate itself from the Federal Union.

Let us suppose the answer to the first question to be No. We will suppose a stanch believer in what used to be called the Divine Right of Kings, and now goes by that of the Cause of Order. No, says he. Rome, if she rose against the Pope-Venice, if she rose against Austria-would be grossly criminal. The movement which created the present kingdom of Italy was altogether abominable. It was very wrong in our ancestors to drive out James the Second, and in the Greeks to drive out the Turks.

Well, but without entering into that question,

have not Americans, at any rate, a right to choose their own rulers? Is there no precedent in their history for such a thing?

Yes, there is; but it is a bad one. The success of the thirteen colonies does not prove them to have been in the right. They had not even the beggarly excuse of being oppressed, as they themselves avowed. Franklin said that the revolt was upon a mere point of honour; and he ought to have known something about it, as he had a good deal to do with getting it up. But, however this may have been, from the moment their independence was recognised matters entered upon a new phase. By that recognition, George the Third placed the American Government in the position which his own had held.

But what government did he recognise? Did he recognise the American Union as a single body? He recognised nothing of the kind. He recognised the thirteen colonies as separate, independent, and sovereign states. The Union was a creation of a later date. The States formed themselves into a federation for their common advantage, bound themselves to do or not to do certain specified acts, intrusted certain definite powers, or attributes of sovereignty, to the central government, and kept the rest to themselves. On the Divine Right theory, the rebels are not the seceding States, but President Lincoln and those who

have aided him in trying to break off portions of those States, in order to form new ones.

But the question of Secession is something beyond this. It is not a justifiable breach of law, for it is not a breach of law at all. I am not concerned with the proofs of this assertion, though they are so clear, I think, that he who runs may read. To bring forward excerpts from the Federal Constitution, or from those of the different States, in support of it, would be alike tedious and unnecessary. I think that the abundance of proof that exists on this subject has done the Southern cause more harm than good; for its advocates, desirous of leaving nothing unsaid which might strengthen their case, have laid so much stress upon what Virginia said when she joined the Union, and what Kentucky said when she did so, and upon the way in which Washington and Hamilton, Madison and Jefferson expressed themselves about it, that they have run the risk of entangling their rights as freemen in a maze of technicalities. I shall avoid the danger and trouble of plunging into it, and content myself with saying that I believe that if, before seceding, South Carolina had referred her right to do so to any competent and impartial tribunal in the world, her claim must have been admitted on strictly legal grounds, without any reference to any motives she may have had for wishing it.

To persons who do not hold to the Divine Right of government all this may seem superfluous, though from some of the arguments that one hears, one would think that, though the subjects of kings may revolt as they please, yet that the citizens of republics may not in other words, free institutions are the only ones under which freedom is not to be allowed. But I believe many are to be found who, while admitting the right of the Southern States to secede, yet think them to have been wrong in exercising it. Their argument is that, though the North is committing a great crime in preventing the others from doing what they have a right to do, yet that the South is not free from blame in provoking what she must have known to be war, for a mere caprice; and that she not only provoked it, but commenced it.

Now the only way in which this argument is to be met, is by a direct contradiction of every part of it. The Southerners did not secede from caprice, but from reasons which would have justified not only a secession but a rebellion. They did not provoke the war; for all the provocation, if that name can be applied to most unsparing threats and most virulent abuse for a long term of years, came from the Northern Abolitionists. They did not commence it; for the first act of war was Lincoln's perfidious attempt to throw supplies into Fort Sumter. And, finally,

they could not know that the Northerners would resist it by force; for not only is there no provision for such resistance by the Constitution, but the fact that it would be illegal, and also both wicked and ridiculous, to attempt to coerce States into any course that they did not approve, has been attested by a chorus of voices from the days of Jefferson and Madison to those of Mr Secretary Seward and Horace Greeley. It is true that Seward and Greeley are now vehement supporters of the war. Philip drunk has reversed the judgment of Philip sober. I will do Mr Seward the justice to say that he is not drunk; he only pretends to be. Consistency is not a virtue much affected by American politicians; and perhaps Mr Seward is as remarkable a case as could be found of the want of it.*

* Mr Seward's opinions as to the legality of Secession found their expression, not very long ago, in rather a remarkable way. A New England senator, I presume an Abolitionist, presented to the House in which he sat a petition for the dissolution of the Union. The motion which he founded on it, met, besides himself, with only two supporters. Those two were Mr Seward and Mr Chase. The fact that both these men should have held, and that one of them should still hold, a seat in the Cabinet of the President, who is waging a long, bloody, and terrible war against an act much less strong than the measure for which they both voted, and one performed in the exercise of rights which he who remains in it has loudly avowed, would be quite incomprehensible except upon the supposition that the political morality of the North has sunk to the level of that of France in