d patriots and Christians. The
opinions of the framers of the Constitution were reversed on these
three subjects by the war. All else remains intact, or can be put _in
statu quo ante bellum_. The Constitution was not abolished. No vital
principle of the Federal system, State interposition excepted, was
destroyed. "The invasions of the Constitution have resulted from
administrative abuses," says Governor Jenkins, "and not from structural
changes in the government. This distinction should be kept constantly
in view. In a complex government like our own let it never be conceded
that a power once usurped is thenceforth a power transferred, nor that
a right once suppressed is for that cause a right extinguished, nor
that a Constitution a thousand times violated becomes a Constitution
abolished." The war did not decide that the powers of the Federal
Government were indefinite and unlimited. That is subsequent
usurpation. The war did not decide that State lines were to be
obliterated, State flags torn down, State governments reduced to
municipalities, and the elements of civil authority fused into one
conglomerate and centralized mass. Whatever may be the fate or the
construction of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, they cannot
mean the concentration of all power at Washington and the complete
control of the States by the general Government. Our Constitution-makers
could not have contemplated political irresponsibility; that the
minority should be at the mercy of the majority; and that the residuary
mass of undelegated powers was to be swallowed up by the delegated.
The fathers felt that no body of men could be safely entrusted with
unrestrained authority, and they knew that "all restrictions on
authority unsustained by an equal antagonist power must for ever prove
wholly inefficient in practice." That a mere party majority can rule as
they please, is hateful despotism. A majority, unhindered by any rule
but their discretion, is anything but free government; for human nature
cannot endure unlimited power, and bodies of men are not more discreet
in their tyranny than individual tyrants. The distinction between the
granting and the executing, the Constitution-making and the law-making
power, is to be reaffirmed. The general Government and the States have
separate and distinct objects and peculiar interests--"the States,
acting separately, representing and protecting the local and peculiar
interests, and acting jointly, thr