answered: "If we cannot have our way, we will destroy
the government." Analyzed, this is seen to be sheer anarchy.

In that hour men remembered what their fathers had endured to found the
Republic and free institutions. When the news came of the attack upon
Fort Sumter, the better angels of men's natures did touch "the mystic
chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field and patriot grave
to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land," and the
tones swelled the chorus of the Union. What other land offered poor men
an opportunity for office, wealth and honours, with full liberty of
thought and speech? Had not the fathers lived and died to make education
democratic through the public schools? Had not the fathers given life
itself to establish the freedom of the printing-press and freedom of
discussion? Had not the fathers bought at great price their political
liberty, and the rights of the ballot? Was not the land dedicated to
toleration and charity in religion? Was the work of Washington and
Jefferson and Hamilton to go down in ruin and nothingness? While the old
world, with her tyrannies, scoffed at the failure of the Republic, men
thought of Bunker Hill and Valley Forge and Yorktown. They thought of
the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. They recalled the
tribute of one of the greatest of English statesmen, who characterized
the American Constitution as "the greatest political instrument ever
struck off by the unaided genius of man."

And now the Republic was to be destroyed, the Constitution torn into
shreds and stamped under foot, the Declaration of Independence made a
thing of jibes and scorn in the palaces of Madrid and Constantinople,
while slavery, with black fingers, was to knit its claws into the throat
of the angel of liberty and choke the life out. Suddenly men saw that
the only way to insure liberty for the white race was to destroy slavery
for the black races. Men determined that the majority had their rights,
and that these rights should not be wrested away by the minority,
fighting in the interests of slavery. Democracy, the "last, best hope of
earth," should not fail! In that moment Liberty stretched forth her
sceptre of justice, "red with insufferable wrath," and her clarion voice
rang to the outermost corners of the land. Three millions of men
assembled to swear fealty to God and country. Then they marched away,
through the towns and across the prairies, into thic