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10 them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the cause which impelled them to the separation." This amendment was introduced by a Pennsylvanian (Lunt, p.358), and passed unanimously by the convention. (Ibid.) To what did this look but secession and separation? Did it not argue the consciousness of a purpose to drive the South to those extremities? What else could the South do but separate, if possible, from the majority which ruled the government, and were animated by such feelings? Mr. Webster, the great apostle of Union in 1851, had said: "I do not hesitate to say and repeat, that if the Northern States refuse wilfullywillfully [sic] or deliberately to carry into effect that part of the constitution which respects the restoration of fugitive slaves, the South would no longer be bound to keep the compact. A bargain broken on one side is broken on all sides." (Lunt, p. 321.) Had not the precise case occurred? Had not the North deliberately and persistently refused to carry into effect that part of the constitution? Was the South bound any longer to keep the compact, according to this high authority? In this opinion of Mr. Webster, Mr. Jefferson undoubtedly concurred. Says Lunt, p. 203: "Mr. Jefferson took a different view of the subject, and it is proper to give his opinion as stated by Mr. John Q. Adams (who appears to have agreed with him) in his eulogy on Mr. Madison. Mr. Adams said: 'Concurring in the doctrines that the separate States have a right to interpose in cases of palpable infractions of the constitution by the Government of the United States, and that the alien and sedition acts presented a case of such infraction, Mr. Jefferson considered them as absolutely null and void, and thought the State legislatures competent, not only to declare, but to make them so, to resist their execution within their respective borders by physical force, and to secede from the Union, rather than to submit to them, if attempted to be carried into execution by force.'" On the 2d of March, 1861, Mr. Greeley declared: "We have repeatedly said, and we once more insist, that the great principle embodied by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, 'that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed,' is sound and just, and that if the slave States, the cotton States, or the gulf States only, choose to form an independent nation, they have a moral right to do so." (Lunt, p. 388-9.)

Is it strange that those States concurred in this opinion? They believed that the government was now in hands which were fast converting it into one of a majority of numbers with unlimited