Besides these, nothing else of a political character was settled, and the second was determined only by the stern arbitrament of war. The right of search was, however, similarly adjusted, and the treaty of peace effected at Ghent, on December 24, 1814, contains no allusion to the _casus belli_. There are few, if any, who do not rejoice at the accomplishment of the first. The mode of emancipation was not such as we would have chosen; but as the problem baffled the wisdom of all the statesmen of the past, we may as well be grateful that African slavery no longer exists to perplex and confound patriots and Christians. The opinions of the framers of the Constitution were reversed on these three subjects by the war. All else remains intact, or can be put _in statu quo ante bellum_. The Constitution was not abolished. No vital principle of the Federal system, State interposition excepted, was destroyed. "The invasions of the Constitution have resulted from administrative abuses," says Governor Jenkins, "and not from structural changes in the government. This distinction should be kept constantly in view. In a complex government like our own let it never be conceded that a power once usurped is thenceforth a power transferred, nor that a right once suppressed is for that cause a right extinguished, nor that a Constitution a thousand times violated becomes a Constitution abolished." The war did not decide that the powers of the Federal Government were indefinite and unlimited. That is subsequent usurpation. The war did not decide that State lines were to be obliterated, State flags torn down, State governments reduced to municipalities, and the elements of civil authority fused into one conglomerate and centralized mass. Whatever may be the fate or the construction of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, they cannot mean the concentration of all power at Washington and the complete control of the States by the general Government. Our Constitution-makers could not have contemplated political irresponsibility; that the minority should be at the mercy of the majority; and that the residuary mass of undelegated powers was to be swallowed up by the delegated. The fathers felt that no body of men could be safely entrusted with unrestrained authority, and they knew that "all restrictions on authority unsustained by an equal antagonist power must for ever prove wholly inefficient in practice." That a mere party majority can rule as they please, is hateful despotism. A majority, unhindered by any rule but their discretion, is anything but free government; for human nature cannot endure unlimited power, and bodies of men are not more discreet in their tyranny than individual tyrants. The distinction between the granting and the executing, the Constitution-making and the law-making power, is to be reaffirmed. The general Government and the States have separate and distinct objects and peculiar interests--"the States,