It is impossible to conceive a movement, contemplating such important political changes, more entirely unattended by displays of violence, passion, and disorder. A simple assertion, with due solemnity, by each State, of its sovereignty--a heritage which it had never surrendered, but which had been respected by innumerable forms of recognition in the history of the Union--and the exercise of those attributes of sovereignty, which are too palpable to require that they shall be indicated, was the peaceable method resorted to of terminating a political alliance which had become injurious to the highest interests of one of the parties. Could there have been a more becoming and dignified exercise of the vaunted right of self-government? It is that right to which America is so conspicuously committed, and which has been such an inexhaustible theme for the tawdry rhetoric of Northern eloquence. Even in the insolence of its triumph, the North feels the necessity of at least a decent pretext for its destruction of the cardinal feature in the American system of government--the sovereignty of the States. With habitual want of candor, Northern writers pretend that the Constitution of the United States does not affirm the sovereignty of the States, and that, therefore, secession was treason against that Constitution to which they had subscribed; in other words, the created does not give authority to the creator--_i. e._, the Constitution, which the States created, does not accredit sovereignty to the States, and, therefore, the States are not sovereign. It is not pretended that the States were not, each of them, originally independent powers, since they were so recognized by Great Britain, in the plainest terms, at the termination of the first revolution. Nor is it asserted that the union of the States, under the title of United States, was the occasion of any surrender of their individual sovereignty, as it was then declared that "each State retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence." A conclusive demonstration of the retention of sovereignty by the States is seen in the entire failure of the Constitution, either by direct assertion or by implication, to claim its surrender to the Union. If the sovereignty of the States be conceded, the South stands justified as having exercised an unquestionable right. It was never formally denied, even at the North, until Mr. Webster, in his debate with Mr. Calhoun, affirmed the doctrine of the supremacy of the Union, to which conclusion the Northern masses sprung with alacrity, as an available justification for compelling the submission of the South to the outrages which they had already commenced.