It is, we know, contended by some reasoners on the subject, that the Rebel States _could not_ do what they palpably _did_. This course of argument is sustained only by confounding duties with powers. By the constitution a State cannot (that is, has no right to) secede, only as, by the moral law, a man cannot (that is, has no right to) commit murder; nevertheless, States have broken away from their obligations to the Union, as murderers have broken away from their obligations to the moral law. It is folly to claim that criminal acts are impossible because they are unjustifiable. The real question relates to the condition in which the criminal acts of the Rebel States left them as political societies. They cannot claim, as some of their Northern champions do for them, that being _in_ the Union in our view, and _out_ of it in their own, the only result of defeating them as Rebels is to restore them as citizens. This would be playing a political game of "Heads I win, tails you lose," which they must know can hardly succeed with a nation which has made such enormous sacrifices of treasure and blood in putting them down. After having, by a solemn act of their own, through conventions of the people, forsworn their duties to the constitution, they by that act forfeited its privileges. In our view they became Rebel enemies, against whom we had both the rights of sovereignty and the rights of war; in their own view, they became foreigners; and from that moment they had no more "constitutional" control of the area they occupied, were no more "States," than if they had transferred their allegiance to a European power, and the war had been prosecuted to wrest the territory they occupied, and the people they ruled, from the clutch of England or France. Even if we consider the Union a mere partnership of States, the same principle will apply; for partnership implies mutual obligations, and no partner can steal the property of his firm, and abscond with it, and then, after he has been hunted down and arrested, claim the rights in the business he enjoyed before he turned rogue.