bs of
Northern cities. The agricultural productions of the South are the
basis of the foreign commerce of the United States; yet Southern cities
do not carry it on. Our foreign trade is almost annihilated. * * *

"No man can for a moment believe, that our ancestors intended to
establish over their posterity, exactly the same sort of Government they
had overthrown. * * * Yet by gradual and steady encroachments on the
part of the people of the North, and acquiescence on the part of the
South, the limitations in the Constitution have been swept away; and the
Government of the United States has become consolidated, with a claim of
limitless powers in its operations. * * *

"A majority in Congress, according to their interested and perverted
views, is omnipotent. * * * Numbers with them, is the great element of
free Government. A majority is infallible and omnipotent. 'The right
divine to rule in Kings,' is only transferred to their majority. The
very object of all Constitutions, in free popular Government, is to
restrain the majority. Constitutions, therefore, according to their
theory, must be most unrighteous inventions, restricting liberty. None
ought to exist; but the body politic ought simply to have a political
organization, to bring out and enforce the will of the majority. This
theory is a remorseless despotism. In resisting it, as applicable to
ourselves, we are vindicating the great cause of free Government, more
important, perhaps, to the World, than the existence of all the United
States."

In his Special Message to the Confederate Congress at Montgomery, April
29, 1861, Mr. Jefferson Davis said:

"From a period as early as 1798, there had existed in all the States a
Party, almost uninterruptedly in the majority, based upon the creed that
each State was, in the last resort, the sole judge, as well of its
wrongs as of the mode and measure of redress. * * * The Democratic
Party of the United States repeated, in its successful canvas of 1836,
the declaration, made in numerous previous political contests, that it
would faithfully abide by and uphold the principles laid down in the
Kentucky and Virginia Legislatures of [1798 and] 1799, and that it
adopts those principles as constituting one of the main foundations of
its political creed."

In a letter addressed by the Rebel Commissioners in London (Yancey, Rost
and Mann), August 14, 1861, to Lord John Russell, Secretary of Foreign
Affairs, it