n. But the very fact that we have a National
Constitution, and legal methods for testing, preventing, or punishing
any infringement of its provisions, demonstrates the absurdity of any
such assumption of right now. When the States surrendered their power
to make war, did they make the single exception of the United States,
and reserve the privilege of declaring war against them at any moment?
If we are a congeries of mediaeval Italian republics, why should the
General Government have expended immense sums in fortifying points
whose strategic position is of continental rather than local
consequence? Florida, after having cost us nobody knows how many
millions of dollars and thousands of lives to render the holding of
slaves possible to her, coolly proposes to withdraw herself from the
Union and take with her one of the keys of the Mexican Gulf, on the
plea that her slave-property is rendered insecure by the Union.
Louisiana, which we bought and paid for to secure the mouth of the
Mississippi, claims the right to make her soil French or Spanish, and
to cork up the river again, whenever the whim may take her. The United
States are not a German Confederation, but a unitary and indivisible
nation, with a national life to protect, a national power to maintain,
and national rights to defend against any and every assailant, at all
hazards. Our national existence is all that gives value to American
citizenship. Without the respect which nothing but our consolidated
character could inspire, we might as well be citizens of the
toy-republic of San Marino, for all the protection it would afford us.
If our claim to a national existence was worth a seven years' war to
establish, it is worth maintaining at any cost; and it is daily
becoming more apparent that the people, so soon as they find that
secession means anything serious, will not allow themselves to be
juggled out of their rights, as members of one of the great powers of
the earth, by a mere quibble of Constitutional interpretation.

We have been so much accustomed to the Buncombe style of oratory, to
hearing men offer the pledge of their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor
on the most trivial occasions, that we are apt to allow a great
latitude in such matters, and only smile to think how small an advance
any intelligent pawnbroker would be likely to make on securities of
this description. The sporadic eloquence that breaks out over the
country on the eve of election, and becom