In the case of the war between the States it would have been the exact truth if the South had said,—­“We do not want to live with you Northern people any longer; we know our institution of slavery is obnoxious to you, and, as you are growing numerically stronger than we, it may at some time in the future be endangered.  So long as you permitted us to control the government, and with the aid of a few friends at the North to enact laws constituting your section a guard against the escape of our property, we were willing to live with you.  You have been submissive to our rule heretofore; but it looks now as if you did not intend to continue so, and we will remain in the Union no longer.”  Instead of this the seceding States cried lustily,—­“Let us alone; you have no constitutional power to interfere with us.”  Newspapers and people at the North reiterated the cry.  Individuals might ignore the constitution; but the Nation itself must not only obey it, but must enforce the strictest construction of that instrument; the construction put upon it by the Southerners themselves.  The fact is the constitution did not apply to any such contingency as the one existing from 1861 to 1865.  Its framers never dreamed of such a contingency occurring.  If they had foreseen it, the probabilities are they would have sanctioned the right of a State or States to withdraw rather than that there should be war between brothers.

The framers were wise in their generation and wanted to do the very best possible to secure their own liberty and independence, and that also of their descendants to the latest days.  It is preposterous to suppose that the people of one generation can lay down the best and only rules of government for all who are to come after them, and under unforeseen contingencies.  At the time of the framing of our constitution the only physical forces that had been subdued and made to serve man and do his labor, were the currents in the streams and in the air we breathe.  Rude machinery, propelled by water power, had been invented; sails to propel ships upon the waters had been set to catch the passing breeze—­but the application of stream to propel vessels against both wind and current, and machinery to do all manner of work had not been thought of.  The instantaneous transmission of messages around the world by means of electricity would probably at that day have been attributed to witchcraft or a league with the Devil.  Immaterial circumstances had changed as greatly as material ones.  We could not and ought not to be rigidly bound by the rules laid down under circumstances so different for emergencies so utterly unanticipated.  The fathers themselves would have been the first to declare that their prerogatives were not irrevocable.  They would surely have resisted secession could they have lived to see the shape it assumed.