Mr. Lincoln took great pains with his message, which he felt to be a very important document.  It was his purpose to say simply what events had occurred, what questions had been opened, and what necessities had arisen; to display the situation and to state facts fairly and fully, but not apparently to argue the case of the North.  Yet it was essential for him so to do this that no doubt could be left as to where the right lay.  This peculiar process of argument by statement had constituted his special strength at the bar, and he now gave an excellent instance of it.  He briefly sketched the condition of public affairs at the time when he assumed the government; he told the story of Sumter, and of the peculiar process whereby Virginia had been linked to the Confederacy.  With a tinge of irony he remarked that, whether the sudden change of feeling among the members of the Virginian Convention was “wrought by their great approval of the assault upon Sumter, or their great resentment at the government’s resistance to that assault, is not definitely known.”

He explained the effect of the neutrality theory of the Border States.  “This,” he said, “would be disunion completed.  Figuratively speaking, it would be the building of an impassable wall along the line of separation,—­and yet not quite an impassable one, for under the guise of neutrality it would tie the hands of the Union men, and freely pass supplies to the insurrectionists....  At a stroke it would take all the trouble off the hands of secession, except what proceeds from the external blockade.”  It would give to the disunionists “disunion, without a struggle of their own.”

Of the blockade and the calls for troops, he said:  “These measures, whether strictly legal or not, were ventured upon under what appeared to be a popular demand and a public necessity, trusting then, as now, that Congress would ratify them.”  At the same time he stated the matter of the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, which has been already referred to.

Speaking of the doctrine that secession was lawful under the Constitution, and that it was not rebellion, he made plain the genuine significance of the issue thus raised:  “It presents ... the question whether a Constitutional Republic or Democracy, a government of the people by the same people, can or cannot maintain its territorial integrity against its own domestic foes.  It presents the question whether discontented individuals, too few in numbers to control the administration according to the organic law in any case, can always, upon the pretenses made in this case, or any other pretenses, or arbitrarily without any pretense, break up their government, and thus practically put an end to free government upon the earth.  It forces us to ask:  Is there in all Republics this inherent fatal weakness?  Must a government of necessity be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?” The