Page:James Bryce American Commonwealth vol 1.djvu/345

CHAP. XXVII and alterable by them only in the manner which its own terms prescribe. It is "an indestructible Union of indestructible States."

It follows from the recognition of the indestructibility of the Union that there must somewhere exist a force capable of preserving it. The National government is now admitted to be such a force. "It can exercise all powers essential to preserve and protect its own existence and that of the States, and the constitutional relation of the States to itself, and to one another."

"May it not," some one will ask, "abuse these powers, abuse them so as to extinguish the States themselves, and turn the by no means implies the loss of distinct and individual existence, or of the right of self-government by the States.... It may be not unreasonably said that the preservation of the States and the maintenance of their governments are as much within the design and care of the Constitution as the preservation of the Union and the maintenance of the national government. The Constitution, in all its provisions, looks to an indestructible Union composed of indestructible States. When, therefore, Texas became one of the United States she entered into an indissoluble relation.... There was no place for reconsideration or revocation except through revolution or through consent of the States. Considered therefore as transactions under the Constitution, the ordinance of secession adopted by the Convention, and ratified by a majority of the citizens of Texas, was absolutely null and utterly without operation in law. The obligations of the State as a member of the Union, and of every citizen of the State as a citizen of the United States, remained perfect and unimpaired." The State did not cease to be a State, nor her citizens to be citizens of the Union. See also the cases of White v. Hart (13 Wall. 646) and Keith v. Clark (97 U. S. 451).

As respects the argument that the Union established by the Constitution of 1789 must be perpetual, because it is declared to have been designed to make a previous perpetual Union more perfect, it may be remarked, as matter of history, that this previous Union (that resting on the Articles of Confederation) had not proved perpetual, but was in fact put an end to by the acceptance in 1788 of the new Constitution by the nine States who first ratified that instrument. After that ratification the Confederation was dead, and the States of North Carolina and Rhode Island, which for some months refused to come into the new Union, were clearly out of the old one, and, de jure if not de facto, stood alone in the world. May it not then be said that those who destroyed a Union purporting to be perpetual were thereafter estopped from holding it to have been perpetual, and from founding on the word "perpetual" an argument against those who tried to upset the new Union in 1861, as the old one had been upset in 1788? The answer to this way of putting the point seems to be to admit that the proceedings of 1788 were in fact revolutionary. In ratifying their new Constitution in that year, the nine States broke through and flung away their previous compact which purported to have been made for ever. But they did so for the sake of forming a better and more enduring compact, and their extra-legal action was amply justified by the necessities of the case.