Again I say, do you require a precedent? I give it. But I will not stake this cause on any precedent. I plant it firmly on the fundamental principle of American Institutions, as embodied in the Declaration of Independence, by which government is recognized as deriving its just powers only _from the consent of the governed_, who may alter or abolish it, when it becomes destructive of their rights. In the debate on the Nebraska Bill, at the overthrow of the Prohibition of Slavery, the Declaration of Independence was denounced as “a self-evident lie.” It is only by similar effrontery that the fundamental principle which sustains the proceedings in Kansas can be assailed. Nay, more: you must disown the Declaration of Independence, and adopt the Circular of the Holy Alliance, which declares that “useful or necessary changes in legislation and in the administration of states _ought to emanate only from the free will and the deliberate and enlightened impulse of those whom God, has rendered responsible for power_.”[121] Face to face I put the principle of the Declaration of Independence and the principle of the Holy Alliance, and bid them grapple. “The one places the remedy in the hands which _feel_ the disorder; the other places the remedy in those hands which _cause_ the disorder”; and when I thus truthfully characterize them, I but adopt a sententious phrase from the Debates in the Virginia Convention on the adoption of the National Constitution.[122] And now these two principles, embodied in the rival propositions of the Senator from New York and the Senator from Illinois, must grapple on this floor. Statesmen and judges, publicists and authors, with names of authority in American history, espouse and vindicate the American principle. Hand in hand they now stand around Kansas, and feel this new State lean on them for support. I content myself with adducing two only, both from slaveholding Virginia, in days when Human Rights were not without support in that State. Listen to the language of St. George Tucker, the distinguished commentator upon Blackstone, uttered from the bench in a judicial opinion. “The power of convening the legal Assemblies, or the ordinary constitutional Legislature, _resided solely in the Executive_. They could neither be chosen without writs issued by its authority, nor assemble, when chosen, but under the same authority. The Conventions, on the contrary, were chosen and assembled either in pursuance of recommendations from Congress or from their own bodies, _or by the discretion and common consent of the people_. They were held even whilst a legal Assembly existed.… The Convention, then, was not the ordinary Legislature of Virginia. It was the body of the people, impelled to assemble from a sense of common danger, consulting for the common good, and acting in all things for the common safety.”[123] Listen also to the language of James Madison:--