To change our metaphor, for the sake of varied and easy illustration, we may say, that the Federal Constitution, though last in the actual order of construction, has come to be the key-stone of the whole arch. It can not now be taken out but at the risk of every portion crumbling into atoms. The State interest may have been predominant in the earlier periods, but generations have since been born under the security of this arch, and a conservative feeling of nationality has been growing up with it. In this way our general government, our State governments, our county or district governments, our city corporations, the municipal authorities of our towns and villages, have become _cemented_ together into one grand harmonious whole, whose coherence is the coherence of every part, and in which no part is the same it would, or might have been, had no such interdependent coherence ever taken place. It becomes, therefore, a question of the most serious moment—What would be the effect of loosening this key of the arch? Could we expect any stone to keep its place, be it great or small? In other words, have we any reason to believe that such an event would be succeeded by two, or three, or a few confederacies, still bound together, or might we not rather expect a universal dissolution of our grand national system? And would it stop here? The charm once broken, would the wounded feeling of nationality find repose in our State governments, or would they, too, in their turn, feel the effects of the same dissolving and decomposing process? These, also, are but creations of law, and compacts, and historical events, and accidents of locality, in which none of the present generation had any share, and which have brought all the smaller political powers within certain boundaries to be members of one larger body politic, with all the irregularities and inequalities it may geographically present. What magic, then, in the bond that holds together the smaller parts composing New York, or Virginia, or Massachusetts, or South Carolina, which is not to be found in the national organization? What sacred immutability in the results giving rise to the one class of political wholes that does not exist in the other? Such questions are becoming already rife among us, and let the healthful charm of our greater nationality be once lost, they would doubtless multiply with a rapidity that might startle even the most radical. The doctrine may not be intended, but it would logically and inevitably result from much of our most popular oratory on the inherent right of self-government, that any part of any separate State might sever its connection with the whole, or might form a union with any contiguous territory, whenever it might seem to the majority of such part to be for their interest, or to belong to their abstract right to make such secession or annexation. There is, however, an extreme to which the principle may be carried, even beyond this.