It is because of confusion in the use of this term that there has been so much confusion in the political controversies where it has been employed. But nowhere has this confusion led to greater absurdity than in the pretension recently made in the name of State Rights,--as if it were reasonable to claim for a technical “State” of the Union that immortality belonging to civil society. From approved authorities it appears that a “State,” even in a broader signification, may lose its life. Dr. Phillimore, in his recent work on International Law, says: “A State, like an individual, may die,” and among the various ways, he says, “by its submission, and the donation of itself, as it were, to another country.”[197] But in the case of our Rebel States there has been a plain submission and donation of themselves, _effective, at least, to break the continuity of government_, if not to destroy that immortality which is claimed. Nor can it make any difference, in breaking this continuity, that the submission and donation, constituting a species of attornment, are to enemies at home rather than to enemies abroad,--to Jefferson Davis rather than to Louis Napoleon. The thread is snapped in one case as much as in the other. But _change of form_ in the actual government may be equally effective. Cicero speaks of change so complete as “to leave no image of a State behind.” This is precisely what has been done throughout the whole Rebel region: no image of a _constitutional_ State is left behind. Another authority, Aristotle, whose words are always weighty, says, that, _the form of the State being changed, the State is no longer the same_, as the harmony is not the same when we modulate out of the Dorian mood into the Phrygian. But, if ever an unlucky people modulated out of one mood into another, it was our Rebels, when they undertook to modulate out of the harmonies of the Constitution into their bloody discords. Without stopping further for these diversions, I content myself with the testimony of Edmund Burke, who, in a striking passage, which seems to have been written for us, portrays the extinction of a political community; but I quote his eloquent words rather for suggestion than authority.