"When the question of secession is before the people of my State, I shall cast my vote as my judgment and conscience shall dictate. Meanwhile I shall examine the issue, and, I trust, dispassionately. But whatever may become of my individual opinion, where Virginia goes I go, whatever be the event." "Would you uphold a wrong in the face of your own conscience?" "Oh, as to that, I do not hold it a question between right and wrong, but simply of advisability. The right of secession I entertain no doubt about." "No doubt as to the right of dismembering and destroying a government which has fostered your infancy, developed your strength, and made you one among the parts of a nation that has no peer in a world's history? Is it possible that intellect and honesty can harbor such a doctrine!" "My dear Harold, you look at the subject as an enthusiast, and you allow your heart not to assist but to control your brain. Men, by association, become attached to forms and symbols, so as in time to believe that upon their existence depends the substance of which they are but the signs. Forty years ago, in the Hawaiian Islands, the death-penalty was inflicted upon a native of the inferior caste, should he chance to pass over the shadow of one of noble birth. So would you avenge an insult to a shadow, while you allow the substance to be stolen from your grasp. Our jewel, as freemen, is the right of self-government; the form of government is a mere convenience--a machine, which may be dismembered, destroyed, remodelled a thousand times, without detriment to the great principle of which it is the outward sign." "You draw a picture of anarchy that would disgrace a confederation of petty savage tribes. What miserable apology for a government would that be whose integrity depends upon the caprice of the governed?" "It is as likely that a government should become tyrannical, as that a people should become capricious. You have simply chosen an unfair word. For _caprice_ substitute _will_, and you have my ideal of a true republic." "And by that ideal, one State, by its individual act, might overturn the entire system adopted for the convenience and safety of the whole." "Not so. It does not follow that the system should be overturned because circumscribed in limit, more than that a business firm should necessarily be ruined by the withdrawal of a partner. Observe, Harold, that the General Government was never a sovereignty, and came into existence only by the consent of each and every individual State. The States were the sovereignties, and their connection with the Union, being the mere creature of their will, can exist only by that will." "Why, Beverly, you might as well argue that this pencil-case, which became mine by an act of volition on your part, because you gave it me, ceases to be mine when you reclaim it."