the minority will not acquiesce, the majority must, or the
government must cease. There is no other alternative; for continuing
the government is acquiescence on one side or the other.

If a minority in such case will secede rather than acquiesce, they make
a precedent which in turn will divide and ruin them; for a minority of
their own will secede from them whenever a majority refuses to be
controlled by such minority. For instance, why may not any portion of
a new confederacy a year or two hence arbitrarily secede again,
precisely as portions of the present Union now claim to secede from it?
All who cherish disunion sentiments are now being educated to the exact
temper of doing this.

Is there such perfect identity of interests among the States to compose
a new Union, as to produce harmony only, and prevent renewed secession?

Plainly, the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy. A
majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations,
and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions
and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever
rejects it does, of necessity, fly to anarchy or to despotism.
Unanimity is impossible; the rule of a minority, as a permanent
arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority
principle, anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left.

I do not forget the position, assumed by some, that constitutional
questions are to be decided by the Supreme Court; nor do I deny that
such decisions must be binding, in any case, upon the parties to a
suit, as to the object of that suit, while they are also entitled to
very high respect and consideration in all parallel cases by all other
departments of the government. And while it is obviously possible that
such decision may be erroneous in any given case, still the evil effect
following it, being limited to that particular case, with the chance
that it may be overruled and never become a precedent for other cases,
can better be borne than could the evils of a different practice. At
the same time, the candid citizen must confess that if the policy of
the government, upon vital questions affecting the whole people, is to
be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant
they are made, in ordinary litigation between parties in personal
actions, the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to
that extent practically resigned