your intensity, your resoluteness, your invincible energy, and wish I could find as much elsewhere in loyal ranks; but not being able to do so, I tell you, either the federal arms will fail to crush the rebellion, or you will succeed alike with your good and your bad. Life is stronger than death, and you represent the only living body just now in the loyal states, and Wendell Phillips is bound to carry it over William H. Seward. So much we see; and forced to a choice between the two, we prefer Phillips, for "a living dog is better than a dead lion."

ARE THE UNITED STATES A NATION ?*

[From Brownson's Quarterly Review for October, 1864.]

No series of essays could possibly have been written, better adapted to the questions with regard to the new constitution agitated by the public at the time of their publication, than these masterly and profound essays, by Hamilton, Jay, and Madison, so well known, so widely studied, and so universally esteemed, under the collective title of The Federalist. There was, at the time, nobody who was not in favor of the several states remaining united under a federal congress or general government, and hardly any one who doubted that the adoption of the new constitution would constitute the American people one political people or nation; but there were those who believed the new constitution would strike a fatal blow at the independent rights of the states respectively, and who for that reason strenuously opposed its adoption. The writers of the essays do not deny that the states under the new constitution would not be severally sovereign, but confine themselves to questions, then uppermost in the public mind, of the necessity and utility of union, the fitness of the proposed constitution to secure it, and to the nature, extent, and limitation of the powers of the government to be created by it, if adopted. On these

* The Fœderalist: A Collection of Essays written in favor of the new Constitution, as agreed upon by the Federal Convention, September 17, 1787. Reprinted from the Original Text. With an Historical Introduction and Notes. By HENRY B. DAWSON. New York: 1864.

questions they have left nothing to be said. On the necessity and utility of union, on the constitution and powers of the general government, their essays are, and must be, high authority as long as that government lasts.

But the question which the American statesman has now to consider in regard to the depositary of American sovereignty prior to the adoption of the constitution, the writers in the Federalist do not expressly discuss, or furnish us the means of answering. All agreed then, as now, in the doctrine of popular sovereignty, or that the people are sovereign; but left undecided the question, What people? the people of the states severally, or the people of the United States? This question, indeed, was hardly raised at the time, or, if raised at all, was considered of no practical importance. In the eighteenth century, all who rejected the doctrine of "the divine right of kings and passive obedience," as asserted by the Stuarts and their adherents, held that government, however constituted, originates in convention, and is founded in compact, expressed in the constitution of the state, or the written instrument that can be folded up and put in one's pocket, or filed away in a pigeon-hole, to use the language of Thomas Paine. Whether the people of the United States were sovereign as united, or as separate and independent states, was a matter of little importance when once the constitution was adopted, or the contract duly ratified; for by that, for certain purposes at least, they would undeniably be created one political people. That was enough for all practical purposes; for the federal government rested then in compact, and no political authority more ultimate than the compact itself was recognized. The age, we should remember, whatever its practical belief, embraced a purely atheistic philosophy, and held, theoretically at least, that nothing is simpler than effects without causes, or for things to make or create themselves.

There can be little doubt that the strongest nationalists in 1787, if they had been asked where was our political sovereignty prior to the adoption of the federal constitution, would have answered, In the states, or the people of the states, severally; and would have maintained, if pressed, that the national sovereignty they asserted was created by the surrender of a certain portion of the rights of the states to the general government. The possibility of such surrender nobody questioned, and nobody saw any thing absurd in the assertion at once of the sovereignty of the Uirion and of the

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states severally. John Locke was generally followed in politics as well as in metaphysics. All through the works of John Adams, the profoundest statesman of the epoch, runs the theory of the origin of government in compact, or the voluntary agreement of the individuals composing the community, like that entered into by the Pilgrims on board the Mayflower. Even in the preamble to the declaration of independence, by the congress of 1776, we find the assertion. that "government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed." Holding this doctrine, the statesmen of 1787 could concede without difficulty that the states, or the people of the states, severally, were sovereign prior to the adoption of the federal constitution, and yet deny them to be sovereign afterwards, as did Mr. Webster, in his celebrated controversy on state rights with General Hayne and Mr. Calhoun, of South Carolina.

Yet the doctrine of the origin of government in compact, in the sense asserted in the eighteenth century, is now, though frequently asserted by small politicians, maintained by no statesman worthy of the name. There is no political philosopher now who does not see that Rousseau's doctrine, in his Contrat Social, has no foundation in fact, is a mere theory, and one that establishes, under the specious garb of liberty, the most odious of all tyrannies, that of an ever-varying and irresponsible majority. Rousseau maintains that all individuals are equal, and that each is sovereign in his own right. But as government is necessary, these sovereign individuals meet, or are imagined to meet, in convention, and agree that the majority shall govern, and govern absolutely; whatever the majority wills is to be law, and whatever it commands must be done, because each individual surrenders his individual sovereignty to the majority, a doctrine that our little politicians still assert, and which is still the theory of the whole body of European democrats, who, as a rule, are at least a century behind the times. God save us from the theories of European democrats, radicals, and revolutionists! This doctrine is not only repugnant to all individual liberty, but to all legitimate authority. Its very general prevalence among us has been most fatal to the development of personal freedom, individual independence, manliness, and frankness of character, on the one hand, and to the maintenance of legitimate authority, and the impartial administration of justice, on the other. Under it, minorities have no protection, and indi

vidual freedom no guaranty. The will of the majority governs, and he who dissents from the opinion of the majority, is for that reason alone virtually outlawed. Popular opinion becomes the criterion of truth and the standard of morality. Everywhere in Europe, in proportion as it has obtained, it has deluged the land in blood, and led to a reign of terror, to the introduction of anarchy, and to the most intolerable despotism; and in our own country, so far as acted on practically, it has swept away all the guaranties originally retained of the rights of minorities and of individuals, and subjected them to the interest, the caprice, or the fanaticism of the majority for the time.

But the doctrine has no foundation in reason. The rights of the state are not made up of the rights surrendered by individuals. If individuals are individually sovereign, they may delegate certain powers to the commonwealth, but cannot surrender their sovereignty. They necessarily retain the right to revoke the powers delegated whenever they choose. So of the states in the Union. Concede that they were severally sovereign and independent states before the adoption of the federal constitution, and you must concede that they are so still. The powers of the general government are in that case not made up of rights surrendered, but simply of powers delegated, to it by the several states, and the sovereignty vests in the states severally, or the people thereof, as before. The federal government, in such case, is not, strictly speaking, a government, but an agency, as the southern leaders contended, created by the states, which retain to it precisely the relation of the principal to the agent. Each state is then free, whenever it judges proper, to revoke the powers it has delegated, and withdraw from the Union, as the seceded states now making war on the Union profess to have done. To concede the original sovereignty of the states severally, and then to deny the right of secession, is simply to outrage common sense. Yet most American citizens, in theory at least, concede that the states, severally, were originally sovereign, and that prior to the adoption of the federal constitution there really was no such national existence as the United States. Even the weight of judicial authority, from first to last, inclines to the side of state sovereignty. It is this fact, which the loyal American instinct combats, that gives so much strength to the so-called confederacy, and secures it the sympathy of nearly all foreign states and statesmen. We say our cause

against it is just, and so it unquestionably is; but not on the ground assumed by the administration and the majority of its adherents.

Up to the breaking out of the rebellion by the secession of South Carolina, in December, 1860, we had held and maintained the theory of state sovereignty, and contended that, under our political system, the original and ultimate sovereignty still vests in the states, or the people of the states, severally; that allegiance is due only to the state; and that the citizen owes obedience to the United States only because his state has by her ratification of the constitution enacted it, and made it, and the legislation by congress under it, a part of her own state law. The state that enacts the Union and its legislation is as competent to reject it as she is to repeal any other of her legislative acts; and, when she does so, her citizens cease to owe even obedience to the federal government, and may, at her command, lawfully resist it, and even fight against it, as against any other foreign power. The sovereign, saving his faith, is always competent to resume the powers he may have delegated, and to unmake any agency he may have created. The sovereign states that have severally made the Union, may, then, each of them, or any one of them, for itself, unmake it, whenever they judge it advisable. Hence, on the doctrine of original and persistent state sovereignty, the secessionists may have acted in good faith, from loyal and patriotic motives, in the simple exercise of their unquestionable rights, and the federal government has no right to denounce them or to make war on them as rebels. Rebels they certainly are not, if that doctrine be true. All this we saw as clearly as did the leaders of the secession movement themselves, and we felt that we must either give up the state-sovereignty theory, or consent to secession.

But give up that theory for its opposite, the theory of consolidation, we could not. Nothing is more certain than that the states do not hold from the Union, for their existence is implied in the conception of Union itself, and we are not one consolidated people under one supreme, omnipotent central government. Nothing is or can be more false than the doctrine put forth by the president before his inauguration, that a state under our political system and a county in a state stand on the same footing, and hold one and the same relation to the government. The right of secession certainly was never contemplated by the framers of the constitution,