Mr. Wilson appears not to have recognized any distinction between unity and union. Union implies plurality or diversity; unity excludes both. Yet he cites, without the least apparent misgiving, the fathers of the republic--Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, Jay, and Madison--who were strenuous for the union of the several states, as authorities in favor of their unity or consolidation in one supreme national government. There were points in which these great men differed among themselves--some of them wished to give more, some of them less, power to the general government--some of them would give more, some of them less, power to the executive, etc., but they all agreed in their efforts to establish the union of the states, and not one of them but would have opposed their unity or consolidation into a single supreme government. Mr. Wilson is equally out in trying, as he does, to make it appear that the strong popular sentiment of the American people, in favor of union, is a sentiment in favor of unity or unification. But starting with the conception of unity or consolidation, and resolving republicanism into the absolute supremacy of the will of the people, irrespective of state organization, Mr. Wilson can find no stopping-place for his party short of the removal of all constitutional or organic limitations on the irresponsible will of the majority for the time, which he contends should in all things be supreme and unopposed. His republicanism, as he explains it, is therefore incompatible with a well-ordered state, and is either no government at all, but universal anarchy, or the unmitigated despotism of majorities--a despotism more oppressive and crushing to all true freedom and manly independence, than any autocracy that the world has ever seen. The fathers of the republic never understood republicanism in this sense. They studied to restrict the sphere of power, and to guard against the supremacy of mere will, whether of the monarch, the nobility, or the people.