176 SnitlliiTH IIisl<>rn-ill Sni-n'lif /^/yw/'.v.
absurd is it to suppose that when different parties enter into a com- pact for certain purposes, either can disregard any one provision and expect nevertheless the other to observe the rest! * * A bargain cannot be broken on one side and still bind the other."
He said in a speech delivered at Buffalo, N. Y. , during the same year:
"The question, fellow-citizens (and I put it to you as the real question) the question is, Whether you and the rest of the people of the great State of New York and of all the States, will so adhere to the Union will so enact and maintain laws to preserve that instru- ment that you will not only remain in the Union yourselves, but permit your Southern brethren to remain in it and help perpetuate it."
How different is the language above quoted Irom Mr. Webster in his Capon Springs speech from the proposition as stated by Mr. Lincoln in his first inaugural, when he says:
"One party to a contract may violate it break it, so to speak but does it not require all to lawfully rescind it?"
But, what more could be expected of Mr. Lincoln, when it is well known that he held that the relation of the States to the Union was the same as that which the counties bear to the States of which they respectively form a part ?
HIS REPLY TO HAYNK.
Those who deny the right of secession are fond of quoting as their authority extracts from Mr. Webster's reply to Mr. Hayne, made in 1830. It is worthy of note that the Capon Springs and Buffalo speeches were^made in 1851; and these last are the product of his riper thinking his profounder reflections. He had evidently learned much about the Constitution in the twenty-one years that had inter- vened, and in his maturer years, was indeed speaking as a statesman, and not only as an advocate, as he did in 1830.
But it is all important to remember that Mr. Webster nowhere in this whole speech refers to the right of secession. His whole argu- ment in this connection, is against the right of nullification, another and very different thing; but one which, as we will presently show, was actually being exercised by fourteen out of the sixteen Free States in 1861.
