When the rebel _States_ (?) passed their respective ordinances of secession, what results flowed from the action? The political doctrine that the union of the States is not a mere confederation of separate States, but a consolidation, within the limits of the Constitution, of the different States, otherwise independent, into _one nation_, is now too well established to remain a subject of debate. We are not, therefore, members of a confederacy, but are a unit--one. It follows, as a matter of course, that no State can withdraw or hide itself from the control of the National Government. The ordinances of secession passed by the rebel States did not, therefore, affect the Federal authority. The broad and just ground taken by President Lincoln in his Inaugural Address was, that the rebel States were still _in_ the Union; and it is, we apprehend, the only tenable ground of right upon which we can carry on the war in which we are now engaged. The Constitution of the United States requires (art. ii. sec. 3) that the President shall 'take care that the laws be faithfully executed.' When the present head of the executive came into office, in March, 1861, he found several of the States, having already seceded on paper, seeking to perfect their treason by 'the armed hand.' Lighthouses had been destroyed, or their beacon fires--the sentinels of the sea--shrouded in darkness, custom houses were given into rebel hands, the revenue cutters were surrendered, and deed followed deed in this dark drama of treason, until it was consummated by firing upon the unarmed Star of the West, while she was performing her errand of mercy, to relieve the hunger and reenforce the exhausted strength of the heroic little garrison of Fort Sumter. The plain and immediate duty of the President was, therefore, to call out the strength of the nation to assist him in 'taking care that the laws be faithfully executed.' And this brings us to the proposition that _the Government is not engaged in a war of conquest with another nation, but in enforcing the laws in what is already a part of the Union_.