at which perverts a restricted agency constituted by
sovereign States for common purposes, into the unlimited despotism
of the majority, and denies all legitimate escape from such
despotism, when powers not delegated are usurped, converts the whole
constitutional fabric into the secure abode of lawless tyranny, and
degrades sovereign States into provincial dependencies.

It is said that the right of secession, if conceded, makes of our
government a mere rope of sand; that to assert its existence
imputes to the framers of the Constitution the folly of planting
the seeds of death in that which was designed for perpetual
existence. If this imputation were true, sir, it would merely prove
that their offspring was not exempt from that mortality which is the
common lot of all that is not created by higher than human
power. But it is not so, sir. Let facts answer theory. For
two-thirds of a century this right has been known by many of the
States to be, at all times, within their power. Yet, up to the
present period, when its exercise has become indispensable to a
people menaced with absolute extermination, there have been but two
instances in which it has been even threatened seriously; the first,
when Massachusetts led the New England States in an attempt to
escape from the dangers of our last war with Great Britain; the
second, when the same State proposed to secede on account of the
admission of Texas as a new State into the Union.

Sir, in the language of our declaration of secession from Great
Britain, it is stated as an established truth, that "all experience
has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are
sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which
they have been accustomed"; and nothing can be more obvious to the
calm and candid observer of passing events than that the disruption
of the Confederacy has been due, in a great measure, not to the
existence, but to the denial of this right. Few candid men would
refuse to admit that the Republicans of the North would have been
checked in their mad career had they been convinced of the existence
of this right, and the intention to assert it. The very knowledge of
its existence by preventing occurrences which alone could prompt its
exercise would have rendered it a most efficient instrument in the
preservation of the Union, But, sir, if the fact were otherwise--
if all the teachings of experience were reversed--better, far