sooner and under other circumstances
(alas! far other circumstances) than we expected. We need now no longer
give guaranties to the slaveholding interest. Taking advantage of such
as it had, it has not hesitated to attack its sole benefactor, and now
all our obligations are at an end. The Congress of the nation may and
will take care that, secession being stifled, there shall not
henceforth be a nullification of the least provision of the organic law,
out of mistaken tenderness for the interest of any section. We have at
last learned a nobler virtue than forbearance, and henceforth either the
Constitution, in all its parts, is to be supreme, or else the nation
must die. One or other of these things must result. Let him who can
hesitate between them write himself down a traitor; for he is one. No
patriot can hesitate. No lover of his country can falter in a time like
this. And if three years of war have not taught a man that this is the
alternative, that man does not deserve a country.

4. But there is a more emphatic expression of our fundamental law than
any yet cited; which, if left to its proper working, as now it may be,
strikes at the root of slavery. It is the fourth section of the fourth
article of the Constitution. 'The United States shall guarantee to every
State in this Union a republican form of government.'

The essence of republicanism is freedom. A republic that, like Sparta,
permits the enslavement of any portion of its people, is surely not
predicated upon the true idea of a republic; and it is worth while to
consider that the ancient republics found their bane in slavery, and
that the aristocratic republics of modern times, like Venice, have
perished. Only those republics survive to-day which, like San Marino,
have free institutions. A republic is a country where the whole people
is the public, and the state the affair of the whole people. It is a
_public affair_ (as its name imports), a thing of the public; and this
is not true of any other than a democracy. For the essential idea of
such a government is expressed in the maxim: 'the greatest good to the
greatest number;' and in that other maxim which is part of our
Declaration of Independence, that 'government derives its just powers
from the consent of the governed.' It needs no argument to show that
these maxims are violated in a country where any portion of the people
are deprived of their highest good--liberty. For what is the object of
governmen