It was about this time, however, that Alexander H. Stephens vainly sought to stem the tide of Secession in his own State, in a speech (November 14) before the Georgia Legislature, in which he declared that Mr. Lincoln "can do nothing unless he is backed by power in Congress. The House of Representatives is largely in the majority against him. In the Senate he will also be powerless. There will be a majority of four against him." He also cogently said: "Many of us have sworn to support it (the Constitution). Can we, therefore, for the mere election of a man to the Presidency--and that too, in accordance with the prescribed forms of the Constitution--make a point of resistance to the Government, and, without becoming the breakers of that sacred instrument ourselves, withdraw ourselves from it? Would we not be in the wrong?" But the occasional words of wisdom that fell from the lips of the few far-seeing statesmen of the South, were as chaff before the storm of Disunion raised by the turbulent Fire-eaters, and were blown far from the South, where they might have done some good for the Union cause, away up to the North, where they contributed to aid the success of the contemplated Treason and Rebellion, by lulling many of the people there, into a false sense of security. Unfortunately, also, even the ablest of the Southern Union men were so tainted with the heretical doctrine of States-Rights, which taught the "paramount allegiance" of the citizen to the State, that their otherwise powerful appeals for the preservation of the Union were almost invariably handicapped by the added protestation that in any event--and however they might deplore the necessity--they would, if need be, go with their State, against their own convictions of duty to the National Union. Hence in this same speech we find that Mr. Stephens destroyed the whole effect of his weighty and logical appeal against Secession from the Union, by adding to it, that, "Should Georgia determine to go out of the Union I shall bow to the will of her people. Their cause is my cause, and their destiny is my destiny; and I trust this will be the ultimate course of all."--and by further advising the calling of a Convention of the people to decide the matter; thus, in advance, as it were, binding himself hand and foot, despite his previous Union utterances, to do the fell bidding of the most rampant Disunionists. And thus, in due time, it befell, as we shall see, that this "saving clause" in his "Union speech," brought him at the end, not to that posture of patriotic heroism to which he aspired when he adjured his Georgian auditors to "let us be found to the last moment standing on the deck (of the Republic), with the Constitution of the United States waving over our heads," but to that of an imprisoned traitor and defeated rebel against the very Republic and Constitution which he had sworn to uphold and defend!