e beyond all others of what is established, averse beyond all
others to the heroic remedy of forcible revolution, they have yet three
times in the space of a century and a half assumed the chances of
rebellion and the certain perils of civil war, rather than submit to
have Right infringed by Prerogative, and the scales of Justice made a
cheat by false weights that kept the shape but lacked the substance of
legitimate precedent. We are forced to think that there must be a bend
sinister in the escutcheon of the descendants of such men, when we find
them setting the form above the substance, and accepting as law that
which is deadly to the spirit while it is true to the letter of
legality. It is a spectacle portentous of moral lapse and social
disorganization, to see a statesman, who has had fifty years' experience
of American politics, quibbling in defence of Executive violence against
a free community, as if the conscience of the nation were no more august
a tribunal than a police justice sitting upon a paltry case of assault.
Yet more portentous is it to see a great people consenting that fraud
should be made national by the voice of a Congress in which the casting
vote may be bought by a tide-waitership, and then invested with the
solemnity of law by a Court whose members are selected, not for
uprightness of character or breadth of mind, but by the inverse test of
their capacity for cringing in subservience to party, and for narrowing
a judgment already slender as the line of personal interest, till it
becomes so threadlike as to bend at the touch, nay, at the breath, of
sectional rapacity. Have we, then, forgotten that the true prosperity of
a nation is moral, and not material? that its strength depends, not on
the width of its boundaries, nor the bulk of its census, but on its
magnanimity, its honor, its fidelity to conscience? There is a Fate
which spins and cuts the threads of national as of individual life, and
the case of God against the people of these United States is not to be
debated before any such petty tribunal as Mr. Buchanan and his advisers
seem to suppose. The sceptre which dropped successively from the grasp
of Egypt, Assyria, Carthage, Greece, Rome, fell from a hand palsied by
the moral degeneracy of the people; and the emasculate usurper or the
foreign barbarian snatched and squandered the heritage of civilization
which escheated for want of legitimate heirs of the old royal race,
whose divine right w