Abraham Lincoln. drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn by the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, that 'the judgments of the Lonl are true and righteous altogether.' With malice towards none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphans, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and all nations." Of the foregoing it has been asked: "Where, since the days of Christ's Sermon on the Mount, is the speech of emperor, or ruler, or king, which can compare with this Inau gural? Where else, but from the teaching of the Son of God, could he have drawn thai Christian charity which pervades the last sen tence, in which he so unconsciously describes his own moral nature: 'With malice towards none, ivith charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right.' No other state paper in American annals, not even Washington's Farewell Address, has made so deep an impression upon the people as this great document." Mr. Lincoln's logical mind and clearness of mental and political vision is well illus trated in his message to Congress at its first special session after he became the President, when he discusses the right of a State to secede and' the "States' Rights doctrine gen erally. In that message he says: "They [the Southern leaders] invented an ingenious sophism, which, if conceded, was followed by perfectly logical steps through all the incidents to complete destruction of the Union. The sophism itself is that any State of the Union may consistently with the National Constitution, and therefore lawfully and peacefully withdraw from the Union with out the consent of the Union or of any other State. The little disguise that the sup posed right is to be exercised only for just
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cause, themselves to be the sole judge of its justice, is too thin to merit any notice. . . . "This sophism derives much, perhaps the whole, of its currency from the assumption that there is some omnipotent and sacred su premacy pertaining to a State—to each State of our Federal Union. Our States have neither more nor less power than that re served to them in our Union by the Constitu tion, no one of them ever having been a State out of the Union. The original ones passed into the Union even before they cast off their British colonial dependence, and the new ones each came into the Union di rectly from a condition of dependence, excepting Texas; and even Texas, in its tem porary independence, was never designated a State. The new ones only took the desig nation of States on1 coming into the Union, while the name was first adopted for the old ones in and by the Declaration of Independ ence. Therein the 'United Colonies' were declared to be 'free and independent States'; but even then the object plainly was not to declare their independence of one another or of the Union, but directly the contrary, as their mutual pledge and their action before, at the time, and afterwards abundantly show. The express plighting of faith by each and all of the original thirteen in the Articles of Con federation, two years later, that the Union shall be perpetual is most conclusive. Hav ing never been States, either in substance or in name, outside of the Union, whence this magical omnipotence of 'States' Rights,' as serting a claim of power to lawfully destroy the Union itself? Much is said about the 'sovereignty' of the States, but the word even is not in the National Constitution, nor, as it is believed, in any of the State constitu tions. What is 'sovereignty' in the political sense of the term? Would it be far wrong to define it 'a political community without a political superior?' Tested by this, no one of our States, except Texas, ever was a sov ereignty; and she even gave up the character
