“For the first time in the history of this contest, it is proposed in this hall to give up the struggle, to abandon the war, and let treason run riot through the land! I will, if I can, dismiss feeling from my heart and try to consider only what bears upon the logic of the speech to which we have just listened. “First of all, the gentleman tells us that the right of secession is a constitutional right. I do not propose to enter into the argument. I have hitherto expressed myself on State sovereignty and State rights, of which this proposition of his is the legitimate child. “But the gentleman takes higher ground—and in that I agree with him, namely, that five million or eight million people possess the right of revolution. Grant it; we agree there. If fifty-nine men can make a revolution successful, they have the right of revolution. If one State wishes to break its connection with the Federal Government, and does it by force, maintaining itself, it is an independent State. If the eleven Southern States are resolved and determined to leave the Union, to secede, to revolutionize, and can maintain that revolution by force, they have revolutionary right to do so. I stand on that platform with the gentleman. “And now the question comes, is it our constitutional duty to let them do it? That is the question. And, in order to reach it, I beg to call your attention, not to argument, but to the condition of affairs that would result from such action—the mere statement of which becomes the strongest possible argument. What does this gentleman propose? Where will he draw the line of division? If the rebels carry into secession what they desire to carry; if their revolution envelops as many States as they intend it shall envelop; if they draw the line where Isham G. Harris, the rebel governor of Tennessee, in the rebel camp near our lines, told Mr. Vallandigham they would draw it,—along the line of the Ohio and Potomac,—if they make good their statement to him, that they will never consent to any other line, then I ask, what is the thing the gentleman proposes to do? “He proposes to leave to the United States a territory reaching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and one hundred miles wide in the center! From Wellsville on the Ohio to Cleveland on the lakes, is one hundred miles. I ask you, Mr. Chairman, if there be a man here so insane as to suppose that the American people will allow their magnificent national proportions to be shorn to so deformed a shape as this?