The Southern Cause Vindicated. 331
that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a sacred right ; a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world.
" Nor is it confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people that can may revolutionize and make their own of so much of the ter- ritory as they inhabit. More than this, a majority of any portion of such people may revolutionize, putting down a minority intermingled with or near them, who may oppose their movements. Such minority was precisely the case of the Tories of our own Revolution. It is a quality of revolutions not to go by old times or old laws, but to break up both and make new ones."
There is no room for enlargement, expansion or extension of this view of Mr. Lincoln on the right of revolution in any form it may take.
Mr. Rawle, an eminent jurist of Pennsylvania, who had been United States District Attorney under President Washington and had been offered by him the Attorney-Generalship of the United States, and who was a firm supporter of the administration of the elder Adams, wrote in 1825: "Having thus endeavored to delineate the general features of this peculiar and invaluable form of government, we shall conclude by adverting to the principles of its cohesion, and to the provisions it contains for its own duration and extension.
"The subject cannot, perhaps, be better introduced than by pre- senting in its own words an emphatical clause in the Constitution : 'The United States shall guarantee to every State in the Union a re- publican form of government, shall protect each of them against in- vasion, and on application of the Legislature, or of the Executive when the Legislature cannot be convened, against domestic vio- lence. '
"The Union is an association of the people of republics : its pre- servation is calculated to depend on the preservation of these repub- lics. The principle of preservation, although certainly the wisest and best, is not essential to the being of a republic, but to continue a member of the Union it must be so presumed, and therefore the guarantee must be so construed.
" It depends on the State itself to retain or abolish the principle of representation, because it depends on itself whether it will continue a member of the Union. To deny this right would be inconsistent with the principles on which our political systems are founded, which is that the people have in all cases to determine how they will be governed. This right must be considered as an ingredient in the
