king up our minds what
coercion means! Ask the first constable, and he will tell you that it
is the force necessary for executing the laws. To avoid the danger of
what men who have seized upon forts, arsenals, and other property of
the United States, and continue to hold them by military force, may
choose to call civil war, we are allowing a state of things to gather
head which will make real civil war the occupation of the whole country
for years to come, and establish it as a permanent institution. There
is no such antipathy between the North and the South as men ambitious
of a consideration in the new republic, which their talents and
character have failed to secure them in the old, would fain call into
existence by asserting that it exists. The misunderstanding and dislike
between them is not so great as they were within living memory between
England and Scotland, as they are now between England and Ireland.
There is no difference of race, language, or religion. Yet, after a
dissatisfaction of near a century and two rebellions, there is no part
of the British dominion more loyal than Scotland, no British subjects
who would be more loath to part with the substantial advantages of
their imperial connection than the Scotch; and even in Ireland, after a
longer and more deadly feud, there is no sane man who would consent to
see his country irrevocably cut off from power and consideration to
obtain an independence which would be nothing but Donnybrook Fair
multiplied by every city, town, and village in the island. The same
considerations of policy and advantage which render the union of
Scotland and Ireland with England a necessity apply with even more
force to the several States of our Union. To let one, or two, or half a
dozen of them break away in a freak of anger or unjust suspicion, or,
still worse, from mistaken notions of sectional advantage, would be to
fail in our duty to ourselves and our country, would be a fatal
blindness to the lessons which immemorial history has been tracing on
the earth's surface, either with the beneficent furrow of the plough,
or, when that was unheeded, the fruitless gash of the cannon ball.

When we speak of coercion, we do not mean violence, but only the
assertion of constituted and acknowledged authority. Even if seceding
States could be conquered back again, they would not be worth the
conquest. We ask only for the assertion of a principle which shall give
the friends of order in th