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576 J. A. Woodburn world, it had made no difference at all. The Southern states and the Southern people were to have all the rights, privileges, immuni- ties, and benefits of the Constitution. They were not bound by its provisions in the conduct of the war, but their opponents were to be restrained from every aggressive act of power not within its specific limits. This was a fearful handicap for the national government. Such a policy would have led to a passive and harmless war — almost purely defensive in its operations. Carried to its logical conclusion, no invasion of the Southern states nor subduing of the Southern people would have been possible under it, and it is very problematical whether the Constitution and the Union could have been saved for the South under its operation. To this party and its constitutional view Thaddeus Stevens was diametrically dpposed. He was its constant and stout antagonist. He derided these sticklers for the Constitution and in unsparing terms he denounced all their works and ways. They and he were at the antipodes of the political world, and they had but little bowels of mercy for one another. Stevens wished to establish a legal basis for the conduct of the war that would give the nation a chance to fight, and in the first discussion on slavery and the war to which I have referred (August 2, 1861) he laid down the legal and proper premises for that fight. He brushed theories aside, looked at the facts, and saw things as they were, and he sought a basis of action best calculated to bring the result desired. He took the bold ground that in the contest for its life the nation was not bound by the limita- tions of the Constitution. The war had abrogated the Constitution — not where it was respected and could be enforced by ordinary civil processes, but with respect to hostile confederated states that had rejected and repudiated the Constitution, trampled it under foot, and were resisting its restoration by organized armies. The people of the Confederate States were public belligerent enemies, and the nation in its efifort to overcome them was bound only by the laws of war and the law of nations. The Constitution had no right to inter- vene if it stood in the way of the laws of war in dealing with the enemy. Who says the Constitution must come in in bar of our action? It is the advocates of rebels, of rebels who have repudiated the Constitu- tion, who have sought to overthrow it and trample it in the dust. Sir, these rebels who have disregarded and set at defiance that instrument are, by every rule of municipal and international law, estopped from pleading it against our action. Sir, it is an absurdity. There must be a party in court to plead it, and that party to be entitled to plead it in court, must first acknowledge its supremacy, or he has no business