The very preamble of the Constitution at once declares that the people of the different States do hereby join themselves together with the view of forming themselves into one nation. "We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." Here a great step was made toward centralization, toward one national government, and the binding together of the States into one nation.
But from that time down to the present the contest has been going on, sometimes openly and sometimes only within the minds of men, between the still alleged sovereignty of the individual States and the acknowledged sovereignty of the central Congress and central government. The disciples of Jefferson, even though they have not known themselves to be his disciples, have been carrying on that fight for State rights which has ended in secession; and the disciples of Hamilton, certainly not knowing themselves to be his disciples, have been making that stand for central government, and for the one acknowledged republic, which is now at work in opposing secession, and which, even though secession should to some extent be accomplished, will, we may hope, nevertheless, and not the less on account of such secession, conquer and put down the spirit of democracy.
The political contest of parties which is being waged now, and which has been waged throughout the history of the United States, has been pursued on one side in support of that idea of an undivided nationality of which I have spoken--of a nationality in which the interests of a part should be esteemed as the interests of the whole; and on the other side it has been pursued in opposition to that idea. I will not here go into the interminable question of slavery--though it is on that question that the Southern or democratic States have most loudly declared their own sovereign rights and their aversion to national interference. Were I to do so I should fail in my present object of explaining the nature of the Constitution of the United States. But I protest against any argument which shall be used to show that the Constitution has failed because it has allowed slavery to produce the present division among the States. I myself think that the Southern or Gulf States will go. I will not pretend to draw the exact line or to say how many of them are doomed; but I believe that South Carolina, with Georgia and perhaps five or six others, will be extruded from the Union. But their very extrusion will be a political success, and will in fact amount to a virtual acknowledgment in the body of the Union of the truth of that system for which the conservative Republican party has contended. If the North obtain the power of settling that question of boundary, the abandonment of those Southern States will be a success, even though the privilege of retaining them be the very point for which the North is now in arms.
The first clause of the Constitution declares that all the legislative powers granted by the Constitution shall be vested in a Congress, which shall consist of a Senate and of a House of Representatives. The House of Representatives is to be rechosen every two years, and shall be elected by the people, such persons in each State having votes for the national Congress as have votes for the legislature of their own States. If, therefore, South Carolina should choose--as she has chosen--to declare that the electors of her own legislature shall possess a property qualification, the electors of members of Congress from South Carolina must also have that qualification. In Massachusetts universal suffrage now prevails, although it is not long since a low property qualification prevailed even in Massachusetts. It therefore follows that members of the House of Representatives in Congress need by no means be all chosen on the same principle. As a fact, universal suffrage* and vote by ballot, that is by open voting papers, prevail in the States, but they do not so prevail by virtue of any enactment of the Constitution. The laws of the States, however, require that the voter shall have been a resident in the State for some period, and generally either deny the right of voting to negroes, or so hamper that privilege that practically it amounts to the same thing.
* Perhaps the better word would have been manhood suffrage; and even that word should be taken with certain restrictions. Aliens, minors, convicts, and men who pay no taxes cannot vote. In some States none can vote unless they can read and write. In some there is a property qualification. In all there are special restrictions against negroes. There is in none an absolutely universal suffrage.
But I keep the name as it best expresses to us in England the system of franchise which has practically come to prevail in the United States.
