eration had any share, and which have brought all the smaller political
powers within certain boundaries to be members of one larger body politic,
with all the irregularities and inequalities it may geographically
present. What magic, then, in the bond that holds together the smaller
parts composing New York, or Virginia, or Massachusetts, or South
Carolina, which is not to be found in the national organization? What
sacred immutability in the results giving rise to the one class of
political wholes that does not exist in the other? Such questions are
becoming already rife among us, and let the healthful charm of our greater
nationality be once lost, they would doubtless multiply with a rapidity
that might startle even the most radical. The doctrine may not be
intended, but it would logically and inevitably result from much of our
most popular oratory on the inherent right of self-government, that any
part of any separate State might sever its connection with the whole, or
might form a union with any contiguous territory, whenever it might seem
to the majority of such part to be for their interest, or to belong to
their abstract right to make such secession or annexation. There is,
however, an extreme to which the principle may be carried, even beyond
this. The tendency to what is called individualism, or the making all
positive legislation dependent for its authority upon the higher law of
the individual sanction, would soon give a practical solution to the most
disorganizing theories that now exist as germs in the idea expressed by
that barbarous but most expressive term _come-outer-ism_. And this
suggests the next and closely related aspect of our important problem.

There is, in the fourth place, the value of the national Constitution as
THE GRAND CONSERVATOR OF ALL LOWER LAW, and of all lower political rights
whatever. No law of the State, of the city, of the family, of the school,
no contract between man and man, no prescriptive right, no title to
property, no exclusive domain in land, no authority over persons, could
fail to be weakened by a wound inflicted on the all-conserving law of our
higher nationality. There are none of these but what are even now
demoralized, and seriously affected in their most inner sanctions, by the
increasing practice of speaking lightly of a bond so sacred. What right
has he to the possession of his acres who counsels resistance to one law
of the land, and, in so doing, strikes at the