an appeal from the constitutional tribunals of the country to a
popular judgment in the aggrieved States, and recognized the right
of those States, upon such popular judgment, to destroy the
Constitution and Union. The "constitutional means" of redress were
the courts of the country, and to these the President must have
referred in the paragraph quoted. After an appeal to the courts,
and a decision upon the questions presented, it would have been
the plain duty of the parties to accept the decision as authoritative
and final. By the advice of the President, the States of the South
were to accept the decision obtained by constitutional means, in
case it was favorable to them, and to disregard it, and to destroy
both the Constitution and the Union, if it should prove to be
adverse to the popular opinion in those States.

It is not improbable that the President's language conveyed more
than his real meaning. He may have intended to affirm that if the
free States should refuse to repeal their obnoxious statutes after
a final decision against their constitutionality, then the slave
States would be justified in revolutionary resistance. But he had
no right to make such an argument or suggest such an hypothesis,
for never in the history of the Federal Government had the decision
of the Supreme judicial tribunal been disobeyed or disregarded by
any State or by any individual. The right of "revolutionary
resistance" was not so foreign to the conception of the American
citizen as to require suggestion and enforcement from Mr. Buchanan.
His argument in support of the right at that crisis was prejudicial
to the Union, and afforded a standing-ground for many Southern men
who were beginning to feel that the doctrine of Secession was
illogical, unsafe, untenable. They now had the argument of a
Northern President in justification of "revolutionary resistance."
Throughout the South, the right of Secession was abandoned by a
large class, and the right of Revolution substituted.

FATAL ADMISSION OF THE PRESIDENT.

Having made his argument in favor of the right of "Revolution,"
Mr. Buchanan proceeded to argue ably and earnestly against the
assumption by any State of an inherent right to secede from the
government at its own will and pleasure. But he utterly destroyed
the force of his reasoning by declaring that "after much serious
reflection" he had arrived at "the conclusion that no p