If such is the real character of the constitution, can any further proof be required of the necessity that it be buried out of sight at once and forever? The truth was that the government was in peril, _solely because it was not fit to exist_. It, and the State governments--all but parts of one and the same system--were rotten with tyranny and crime. And being bound together by no honest tie, and existing for no honest purpose, destruction was the only honest doom to which any of them were entitled. And if we had spent the same money and blood to destroy them, that we did to preserve them, it would have been ten thousand times more creditable to our intelligence and character as a people. Clearly the court has not strengthened its case at all by this picture of the peril in which the government was placed. It has only shown to what desperate straits a government, founded on usurpation and fraud, and devoted to robbery and oppression, may be brought, by the quarrels that are liable to arise between the different factions--that is, the different bands of robbers--of which it is composed. When such quarrels arise, it is not to be expected that either faction--having never had any regard to human rights, when acting in concert with the other--will hesitate at any new crimes that may be necessary to prolong its existence. Here was a government that had never had any legitimate existence. It professedly rested all its authority on a certain paper called a constitution; a paper, I repeat, that nobody had ever signed, that few persons had ever read, that the great body of the people had never seen. This government had been imposed, by a few property holders, upon a people too poor, too scattered, and many of them too ignorant, to resist. It had been carried on, for some seventy years, by a mere cabal of irresponsible men, called lawmakers. In this cabal, the several local bands of robbers--the slaveholders of the South, the iron monopolists, the woollen monopolists, and the money monopolists, of the North--were represented. The whole purpose of its laws was to rob and enslave the many--both North and South--for the benefit of a few. But these robbers and tyrants quarreled--as lesser bands of robbers have done--over the division of their spoils. And hence the war. No such principle as justice to anybody--black or white--was the ruling motive on either side.