and it has
been for you to say (you might to-day, as it is the last day, say so),
whether the Union shall be saved or not. I know, that gallant Old
Dominion will never put up with less than her rights; and if she
would, I should entertain for her contempt. I should feel contempt for
her if she were to ask for any thing more than her rights; and so I
would if she were to put up with any thing less than her
constitutional rights. Then, sir, secession has taken place, and it
will go on unless we do right.

Mr. President, in the remarks which I made on the 19th of December
last, in reply to the Senator from Tennessee, I took the ground that a
State might rightfully secede from the Union when she could no longer
remain in it on an equal footing with the other States; in other
words, when her continuance as a member of the Confederacy involved
the sacrifice of her constitutional rights, safety, and honor. This
right I deduced from the theory of equality of the States, upon which
rests the whole fabric of our unrivalled system of government--unrivalled,
as it came from the hands of its illustrious framers--a model as
perfect, perhaps, as human wisdom could devise, securing to all the
blessings of civil and religious liberty, when rightly understood and
properly administered; but like all other Governments, and even
Christianity itself, a most dangerous engine of oppression when,
having fallen into the hands of persons strangers to its spirit, and
unmindful of the beneficent objects for which it was framed, it is
perverted from its high and noble mission to the base uses of a
selfish or sectional ambition, or a blind and bigoted fanaticism. I
said, on that occasion--referring to this fundamental principle of our
Government, the equality of the States--that "as long as this equality
be maintained the Union will endure, and no longer." I might here
undertake to enforce, by argument and the authority of writers on the
nature and purposes of our Government, this, to me, self-evident
proposition. But I deem it unnecessary to consume the time of the
Senate in discussing that branch of the subject.

I propose, Mr. President, to confine what I have to say in regard to
the right of secession to the question, Who must judge whether such
right exists, and when it should be exercised? According to the theory
of every despotic Government, of ancient or modern times, there is no
such right. A province of an empire, how much soever oppress