place without letting out some
of the life-blood that flows in each member, and in every fibre of each
member. It had, indeed, its origin in the union of the parts, but its
vital principle has modified the parts, and modified their life, so that
you can not now hurt it, or kill it, without producing universal pain and
universal death. Nor was such union either arbitrary or accidental. Our
general political organization was as naturally born out of the
circumstances in which we were placed, as our several State polities grew
out of the union of the feeble and varied sources in which they had their
historical origin. The written Constitution declarative of the national
coalescence (or _growing together_) only expressed an _effect_, instead of
constituting a cause.

To change our metaphor, for the sake of varied and easy illustration, we
may say, that the Federal Constitution, though last in the actual order of
construction, has come to be the key-stone of the whole arch. It can not
now be taken out but at the risk of every portion crumbling into atoms.
The State interest may have been predominant in the earlier periods, but
generations have since been born under the security of this arch, and a
conservative feeling of nationality has been growing up with it. In this
way our general government, our State governments, our county or district
governments, our city corporations, the municipal authorities of our towns
and villages, have become _cemented_ together into one grand harmonious
whole, whose coherence is the coherence of every part, and in which no
part is the same it would, or might have been, had no such interdependent
coherence ever taken place. It becomes, therefore, a question of the most
serious moment--What would be the effect of loosening this key of the arch?
Could we expect any stone to keep its place, be it great or small? In
other words, have we any reason to believe that such an event would be
succeeded by two, or three, or a few confederacies, still bound together,
or might we not rather expect a universal dissolution of our grand
national system?

And would it stop here? The charm once broken, would the wounded feeling
of nationality find repose in our State governments, or would they, too,
in their turn, feel the effects of the same dissolving and decomposing
process? These, also, are but creations of law, and compacts, and
historical events, and accidents of locality, in which none of the present
gen