Page:Essays on the Civil War and Reconstruction.djvu/76

62, satisfactorily settled the matter of supplies.

By the summer of 1863, the question of war powers in the general government for the suppression of insurrection had been definitely settled. The military result of the war became only a question of time, and the legal and political results gradually began to assume the greatest importance. Most obvious of these was the final disappearance of the assumed right of state secession, and with it the whole doctrine of state sovereignty in all its ramifications. For, while it is often said that a right cannot be destroyed by force, the maxim refers rather to the abstract moral conviction than to the concrete legal privilege. The effort to exercise the alleged right had failed; and whether the means employed to prevent the exercise were revolutionary or not, the constitutional law of the country can take cognizance only of the results. But if the right of a state as an organized community to sever its political relations with other communities does not exist, there can be no claim of sovereignty for the state. For if political sovereignty means anything, it includes the attribute of self-determination as to its status in respect to other sovereignties. Limitation in this attribute is fatal to the conception of sovereignty, and accordingly, the failure of secession removed one pregnant source of confusion at the very basis of our system.