But they may be summed up in a few words. The causes lie in the fruitless attempt to run a Republican Government upon an aristocratic code of laws, and the remedy is to remodel the code by the principles of the declaration, which should be made the inspiration of every provision, as well as the key to its construction. I might enumerate the special evils that have grown out of the error made in the Constitution—the vicious legislation for which this error laid the foundation—that the rule of the majority is not a Republican idea; that “the majority” is another name for the despot; that minorities are entitled to, and can be represented; I might show that the United States is, after all, nothing but a confederation of equal and antagonistic powers, and not a Federal Union; that Washington is more a place in which representatives from the several States assemble to quarrel over the spoils of office and to lay the ropes for the succession, than it is the capital of a free and mighty people; that there is such a contrariety of laws in the several States upon any given subject, that it puzzles a Philadelphia lawyer to tell whether a given act is a crime, a misdemeanour, or whether actionable at all in the different States; if people be married in one State, whether they are so legally in any other, or if divorced the same. I might show that taxation is unequal and oppressive, and the revenue unjust; and if there were need of it, which there is not, that official patronage is a polite name for public plunder, and that the public service is a vast system of organized corruption. Had the original error not been made, had the fountain been kept pure, none of these baneful things could have been engrafted into the system. But they have now obtained a root so deep that they can never be exterminated save by uprooting the system. They are the Canada thistles in the fertile meadow, that spread themselves until they absorb the whole vitality of the soil and thrust out the useful harvest. These thistles have spread and seeded in the government until they have thrust out every honest servant of the people, and until one who has any care for his reputation cannot afford to meddle with the government. MUST WE HAVE A REVOLUTION?