no event may a State be unwillingly deprived of its
equal suffrage in the Senate, which is the distinguishing mark of the
independent equality of all the States in the Union. On the other hand,
the rights of the States being thus protected in a manner and degree
which we must suppose to have been satisfactory to the men who framed
and the States which ratified the Constitution, the article then
proceeds to care for the rights of the Nation, by declaring that the
amendment duly ratified by three fourths of the States 'shall be valid,
as part of the Constitution:' thus binding all the States, the three
fourths which have ratified it, and the one fourth which may not have
ratified it. We have here a key to the motives of the Southern
rebellion. The leaders of Southern politics knew well that an amendment
like the one now proposed must one day come, and that whenever it should
come, article fifth left them no pretext for resistance. So they
precipitated their revolution, and have only hastened that inevitable
day.

But it is objected that the right to amend the Constitution does not
give us the right to enlarge its powers. Why not? And if not, to what
things does the right of amendment extend? Such an interpretation makes
article fifth an absurdity. This objection springs from the same
mischievous doctrine of State sovereignty, which has so outraged the
patriotic common sense of the people by the denial of our right to
'coerce' a State, and tends to the same result--nullification and
secession. It is good logic for a confederation, but bad logic for a
nation, to say that the articles of its organic law may not be changed
by the will of the people. And let us not neglect to observe in the
provisions of article fifth the strong incidental proof that the
Constitution of the United States was meant to be the basis of a
_nation_, and not the compact of a _confederation_. For how may this
article be reconciled with the theory of a compact? _Three fourths_ of
the States may concur in adopting an amendment that shall be valid as
part of the Constitution, which declares itself to be the supreme law of
the land, over _all_ the States.

This incidental point serves fitly to introduce the second branch of our
discussion, namely:

II. THE EXPEDIENCY AND NECESSITY OF THE PROPOSED AMENDMENT.

For slavery, or, in other words (lest we seem to offend some), a
rebellion in the interests and for the avowed establishment of slavery,
has