considered the States; but this they did not do, and they were not powerful enough to do it. The large proportion of them were compelled to form a part of the Rebel power. And this brings us directly to the heart of the matter. It is asserted that the Acts of Secession, being unconstitutional, were inoperative and void. But they were passed by the people of the several States which seceded, and the persons and property of the whole people were indiscriminately employed in making them effective. The States held by Rebel armies were Rebel States. All the population were necessarily, in the view of the Federal government, Rebel enemies. Consequently the territory of the States was as "void" of citizens of the United States as the Acts of Secession were "void." The only things left, then, were the inoperative ideas of States. Again, to put the argument in another form, it is asserted, that, though the people of a State may commit treason, the State itself remains unaffected by the crime. A distinction is here made between a State and the people who constitute it,--between the State and the persons who create its constitution and organize its government. The State constitution which existed while it was a State, in the Federal meaning of the word, was destroyed in an essential part by the same authority which created it, namely, a convention of the people of the State; and yet it is said that the State remained unaffected by the deed. By this course of reasoning, a State is defined an abstract essence which can comfortably exist in all its rights and privileges, _in potentia_, apart from all visible embodiment; a State which is the possibility of a State and not the actuality of one; a State which can be brought into the line of real vision only by some such contrivance as that employed by the German playwright, who, in a drama on the subject of the Creation, represented Adam crossing the stage _going_ to be created. There is, it is true, one method of getting a kind of body to this abstract State, but it is a method which may well frighten the hardiest American reasoner. It was employed by Burke in one of the audacities of his logic directed against the governments established after the French Revolution of 1789. He took the ground, that France was not in the French territory or in the French people, but in the persons who represented its old polity, and who had escaped into England and Germany. These constituted what he called "Moral France," in distinction from "Geographical France"; and Moral France, he said, had emigrated.