tt
who would not abandon the flag which he had illustrated with the
devotion of a lifetime; to-day, it is General Harney or Commodore
Kearney who has concluded to be true to the country whose livery he has
worn and whose bread he has eaten for half a century; to-morrow, it
will be Ensign Stebbins who has been magnanimous enough not to throw up
his commission. What are we to make of the extraordinary confusion of
ideas which such things indicate? In what other country would it be
considered creditable to an officer that he merely did not turn traitor
at the first opportunity? There can be no doubt of the honor both of
the army and navy, and of their loyalty to their country. They will do
their duty, if we do ours in saving them a country to which they can be
loyal.

We have been so long habituated to a kind of local independence in the
management of our affairs, and the central government has fortunately
had so little occasion for making itself felt at home and in the
domestic concerns of the States, that the idea of its relation to us as
a power, except for protection from without, has gradually become vague
and alien to our ordinary habits of thought. We have so long heard the
principle admitted, and seen it acted on with advantage to the general
weal, that the people are sovereign in their own affairs, that we must
recover our presence of mind before we see the fallacy of the
assumption, that the people, or a bare majority of them, in a single
State, can exercise their right of sovereignty as against the will of
the nation legitimately expressed. When such a contingency arises, it
is for a moment difficult to get rid of our habitual associations, and
to feel that we are not a mere partnership, dissolvable whether by
mutual consent or on the demand of one or more of its members, but a
nation, which can never abdicate its right, and can never surrender it
while virtue enough is left in the people to make it worth retaining.
It would seem to be the will of God that from time to time the manhood
of nations, like that of individuals, should be tried by great dangers
or by great opportunities. If the manhood be there, it makes the great
opportunity out of the great danger; if it be not there, then the great
danger out of the great opportunity. The occasion is offered us now of
trying whether a conscious nationality and a timely concentration of
the popular will for its maintenance be possible in a democracy, or
whether it