healthy, and is a sign that the ill humors of the body
politic are coming to the surface, where they are comparatively
harmless. It is the tendency of all creeds, opinions, and political
dogmas that have once defined themselves in institutions to become
inoperative. The vital and formative principle, which was active during
the process of crystallization into sects, or schools of thought, or
governments, ceases to act; and what was once a living emanation of the
Eternal Mind, organically operative in history, becomes the dead
formula on men's lips and the dry topic of the annalist. It has been
our good fortune that a question has been thrust upon us which has
forced us to reconsider the primal principles of government, which has
appealed to conscience as well as reason, and, by bringing the theories
of the Declaration of Independence to the test of experience in our
thought and life and action, has realized a tradition of the memory
into a conviction of the understanding and the soul. It will not do for
the Republicans to confine themselves to the mere political argument,
for the matter then becomes one of expediency, with two defensible
sides to it; they must go deeper, to the radical question of right and
wrong, or they surrender the chief advantage of their position. What
Spinoza says of laws is equally true of party platforms,--that those
are strong which appeal to reason, but those are impregnable which
compel the assent both of reason and the common affections of mankind.

No man pretends that under the Constitution there is any possibility of
interference with the domestic relations of the individual States; no
party has ever remotely hinted at any such interference; but what the
Republicans affirm is, that in every contingency where the Constitution
can be construed in favor of freedom, it ought to be and shall be so
construed. It is idle to talk of sectionalism, abolitionism, and
hostility to the laws. The principles of liberty and humanity cannot,
by virtue of their very nature, be sectional, any more than light and
heat. Prevention is not abolition, and unjust laws are the only serious
enemies that Law ever had. With history before us, it is no treason to
question the infallibility of a court; for courts are never wiser or
more venerable than the men composing them, and a decision that
reverses precedent cannot arrogate to itself any immunity from
reversal. Truth is the only unrepealable thing.

We are grave