All legislative bodies are liable to sudden and wayward impulses.  To these the Congress of our young country is more exposed than the Parliaments or Chambers of older nations.  It would have been very unsafe to trust a Congressional majority with the power of amending the Constitution.

Difficulties and delays were properly put in the way of exercising such a prerogative.  To two-thirds of both houses, or to a convention called by the legislatures of two-thirds of the several States, was granted the power of proposing amendments; while the power to ratify these was not confided to less than to the legislatures, or to the conventions, of three-fourths of the States composing the Union.

To alter the Constitution in any other way—­as by the consent of a majority only of the several States—­would be a revolutionary act.  Doubtless revolutionary acts become a justifiable remedy on rare and great occasions, as in 1776; but they are usually replete with danger.  They are never more dangerous than when employed by one section of a confederacy against another, weaker section of the same.  To the stability of government, it is necessary that the rights of minorities should be strictly respected.  The end does not necessarily justify the means.  “No example,” says an eminent and philosophical writer, “is more dangerous than that of violence employed for a good purpose by well-meaning men."[6]

[Footnote 6:  “Il n’y a pas de plus dangereux exemple que celui de la violence exercee pour le bien et par les gens de bien.”—­“L’Ancien Regime et la Revolution,” par Alexis de Tocqueville, Paris, 1856, p. 310.]

To such considerations has it been, in a measure, due that the people of the United States, with as much unanimity as usually characterizes any national decision, have held back, until now, from following the example of the civilized nations of Europe in emancipating their slaves.  Until the Secessionists levied war against the Union, not the Democratic party alone, but the mass of the Republican party also, assented to the declaration in Abraham Lincoln’s Inaugural, that they had “no purpose to interfere, directly or indirectly, with the institution of Slavery in the States where it exists.”  It had never been possible to obtain the votes of three-fourths of the States in favor of emancipation; and a large majority of those who held human servitude to be a moral wrong had looked upon its toleration among our neighbors of the South as an evil of less magnitude than the violation of the Constitution.

Though the wisdom of the ablest statesmen of the Revolution, without distinction of sections, recognized negro slavery as an iniquity and as a political element fraught with inevitable danger in the future, yet the evils and the dangers which are inseparably connected with that element have never been so clearly seen, have never made themselves so terribly apparent, as in the course of this war.