case as the one supposed, be competent for the United States to designate persons who should take charge of the State Government, and administer it in trust for the children of its former recreant inhabitants, and as their legal and political successors. Reverting to the settled principles of the law, we find that the essential idea of a corporation is its immortality, or individuality, or the perpetual succession of persons under it, notwithstanding the changes of the individual persons who compose it. The State, like a corporation, has an individuality of its own, which is not affected by the changes of the individual persons composing it. It has an immortality, not affected by their entire extinction. Its own organic existence is not thereby extinguished. In other words, the State cannot be merged, or swallowed up, in the Nation. It seems, then, that the doctrine of State suicide, as propounded in so many words, by its author, in the original resolutions offered in Congress, is equally repugnant to the Constitution and good sense. It is, in effect, revolutionary; for it would dismember the Union, by striking out of existence States as purely and completely sovereign within the sphere of their functions as the Nation itself. It is idle to deny that it thus recognizes and gives support to the doctrine of secession; for it accepts the results of secession, and supposes that accomplished by the rebellion which the war is meant to thwart and prevent, to wit, the disruption of the ties that bind the States and the Nation together in one harmonious whole.