tar--raised over the public buildings throughout the
State.

Many Southerners, including not a few who were inclined to Secession as
the only course in the face of the Republican victory, considered the
precipitancy of South Carolina unwise and unjustifiable. She should,
they thought, rather have awaited a conference with the other Southern
States and the determination of a common policy. But in fact there can
be little doubt that the audacity of her action was a distinct spur to
the Secessionist movement. It gave it a focus, a point round which to
rally. The idea of a Southern Confederacy was undoubtedly already in the
air. But it might have remained long and perhaps permanently in the air
if no State had been ready at once to take the first definite and
material step. It was now no longer a mere abstract conception or
inspiration. The nucleus of the thing actually existed in the Republic
of South Carolina, which every believer in State Sovereignty was bound
to recognize as a present independent State. It acted, so to speak, as a
magnet to draw other alarmed and discontented States out of the Union.

The energy of the South Carolinian Secessionists might have produced
less effect had anything like a corresponding energy been displayed by
the Government of the United States. But when men impatiently looked to
Washington for counsel and decision they found neither. The conduct of
President Buchanan moved men at the time to contemptuous impatience, and
history has echoed the contemporary verdict. Just one fact may perhaps
be urged in extenuation: if he was a weak man he was also in a weak
position. A real and very practical defect, as it seems to me, in the
Constitution of the United States is the four months' interval between
the election of a President and his installation. The origin of the
practice is obvious enough: it is a relic of the fiction of the
Electoral College, which is supposed to be spending those months in
searching America for the fittest man to be chief magistrate. But now
that everyone knows on the morrow of the election of the College who is
to be President, the effect may easily be to leave the immense power and
responsibility of the American Executive during a critical period in the
hands of a man who has no longer the moral authority of a popular
mandate--whose policy the people have perhaps just rejected. So it was
in this case. Buchanan was called upon to face a crisis produced by the
defeat of