The rebellion failed, and there were several causes for the failure:  Dissensions among the rebels, the want of efficient aid from France, the want of money, and the conviction of a large part of the Scots themselves of the value of the Union.  The rebellion failed, and sullen submission to confiscation, military cruelty, and political proscription followed.

On Sunday, the 18th of June, 1815, not quite seventy years after, there charged side by side upon the elite of a French army, with the men of London, the Highlanders and Irish.  A descendant of Cameron of Lochiel fell leading them on.  The last spark of Jacobite enthusiasm and Scottish hatred of Englishmen had died out years before.  Those who witnessed the entry of the Chevalier into Edinburgh lived to see the whole nation devouring with enthusiasm the novel of “Waverley,”—­so entirely had the bitterness of what had happened “sixty years since” passed from their minds!

We have thus selected two points of history as the short answer to the cry, “You can never reconstruct the Union,” which History, the impartial judge on the bench, pronounces to the wranglers at the bar below.  “Never” is a long word to speak, if it be a short one to spell.  Events move fast, and the logic of Fate is more convincing than the arguments of daily editors.  The “tout arrive en France” is true of the world in general, so far as relates to isolated circumstances.  The very fact that a threatened disruption of our Union has been possible ought to forbid any one from concluding that reconstruction, or rather restoration, is impossible.  Twenty years after the Battle of Culloden, Jacobitism was a dream; fifty years after, it was a memory; a century after, it was an antiquarian study.

The real question we are to ask concerning the present rebellion, and the only one which is of importance, is, What is it based upon? an eternal or an arbitrary principle?  An eternal principle renews itself till it succeeds,—­if not in one century, then in another.  An arbitrary principle makes its fierce fight and then is slain, and men bury it as soon as they can.  The Stuarts represented an arbitrary principle.  They were the impersonation of unconstitutional power.  Hereditary right they had, and the Hanoverians had not.  According to Mr. Thackeray, and according to the strictest fact, we suspect the Georges were no more personally estimable than the Jameses, and they were far less kingly-mannered.  But they were willing to govern England according to law, and the Stuarts wore determined to govern according to prerogative.