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how is her concurrence to be obtained ? She must be made the cen- ter of the Confederacy. Vermont and New Jersey would follow, of course; and Rhode Island of necessity."

THE HARTFORD CONVENTION.

In 1814, the Hartford Convention was called and met in conse- quence ot the opposition of New England to the war then pending with Great Britain. Delegates were sent to this Convention by the Legislatures of Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut, and several counties and towns from other Northern States also sent representatives. This Convention, after deliberating with closed doors on the propriety of withdrawing the States represented in it from the Union, published an address, in which it said, among other things:

" If the Union be destined to dissolution it should, if

possible, be the work of peaceable times* and deliberate consent.

Whenever it shall appear that the causes are radical and permanent, a separation by equitable arrangement will be preferable to an alliance by constraint among nominal friends, but real enemies. ' '

In 1839, Ex- President John Ouincy Adams, in an address deliv- ered by him in New York, said:

' ' The indissoluble link of union between the people of the several States of this confederated nation is, after all, not in the right, but in the heart. If the day should ever come (may Heaven avert it) when the affections of the people of these States shall be alienated from each other, the bonds of political association will not long hold together parties no longer attracted by the magnetism of consolidated interests and kindly sympathies; and far better will it be for the people of the disunited States to part in friendship with each other than to be held together by constraint. ' '

This same man presented to Congress the first petition ever pre- sented in that body for a dissolution of the Union.

Mr. William Rawle, a distinguished lawyer and jurist of Pennsyl- vania, in his work on the Constitution, says this:

" It depends on the State itself to retain or abolish the principle of representation, because it depends on itself whether it will con- tinue a member of the Union. To deny this right would be incon- sistent with the principles on which all our political systems are