These considerations explain the importance which the Americans attach to the Union, and the necessity under which they are placed of defending it by force at this point if they mean to defend it at all. It is urged in opposition to this, that it is inconsistent in republicans to attempt to force men to continue members of a community which they wish to leave, and that it is particularly inconsistent in the Americans to do so, because they owe their own national existence to a revolt against Great Britain. There are several independent answers to this argument, each of which ought to prevent either _bonâ-fide_ inquirers or accurate reasoners from using it. In the first place, it proves nothing, for the question is not whether the Americans are consistent, but whether they are right—that is, whether they are taking the course which is, on the whole, best and wisest. To charge them with inconsistency, even if the charge were true, could produce nothing but irritation; for if such a charge were made out, it would come to this: “You are quite right in trying to reduce the South to obedience, but you must admit that the principles which your grandfathers fought for in 1776 were false.” If they are right, what is the use of vexing them about their grandfathers? If they are wrong, why increase the difficulty of convincing them by undertaking to show that the error is condemned by the example of their grandfathers? The whole argument is invidious, and serves no other purpose than that of creating prejudice and rancour. In the second place the charge is altogether untrue. The tone of jovial, half-chuckling banter which is the curse of newspaper writing, so much obscures the arguments which are put forward on this subject, that it is generally difficult to do exact justice to them. Sometimes it appears as if the writer meant to say that under a republican form of government no one ought to be made to do anything he disliked. This, of course, would be fatal not only to the rights of such governments to suppress insurrection, but to their right to administer civil or criminal justice. At other times the ground taken appears to be substantially this—that republican institutions generally, and the government of the United States in particular, are founded on the principle that every body of men competent in point of number and local situation to form an independent political body, has a right, as against any other body of which it forms a part, to announce its intention of doing so, and immediately to carry that intention into execution, and that the body of which it forms a part has no right forcibly to prevent it. This, it is asserted, is the only principle on which the American Declaration of Independence can be justified, and it equally justifies the Confederate States in seceding from the Union.