There is little ground for wonder at the total ignorance and persistent misconception in the mind of Europe, at the commencement of the war, of the motives and purposes of the Confederates in seeking a dissolution of the Union, when we consider the limited information and perverted views of the Northern people and politicians respecting the nature of the Federal Government and the intentions of its authors. Naturally enough, perhaps, the North, seeing in the Union the source of its marvelous material prosperity, and with an astute appreciation of its ability, by its rapidly-growing numerical majority, to pervert the Government to any purpose of sectional aggression agreeable to its ambition or interests, refused to tolerate, as either rational or honest, any theory that contemplated disunion as possible in any contingency. In their willful ignorance and misapprehension most Northern orators and writers denounced the doctrines of States' Rights as _new inventions_--as innovations upon the faith of the fathers of the Republic--and professed to regard the most enlightened and patriotic statesmen of the South, the pupils and followers of illustrious Virginians and Carolinians of the Revolutionary era, as agitators, conspirators, and plotters of treason against the Union. Upon the score of antiquity, States' Rights principles have a claim to respectability--not for a moment to be compared with the wretched devices of expediency or the hybrid products of political atheism, to which the brazen audacity and hypocrisy of the times apply the misnomer of "principles." They are, in fact, older than the Union, and antedate, not only the present Constitution, but even the famous Articles of Confederation, under which our forefathers fought through the first Revolution. The Congress which adopted the Declaration of Independence emphatically negatived a proposition looking to consolidation, offered by New Hampshire on the 15th of June, 1776, that the Thirteen Colonies be declared a "free and independent State," and expressly affirmed their separate sovereignty by declaring them to be "free and independent States." The declaration of the Articles of Confederation was still more explicit--that "each State retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this Confederation expressly delegated to the United States in Congress assembled." The Convention of 1787 clearly designed the present Constitution to be the instrument of a closer association of the States than had been effected by the Articles of Confederation, but the proof is exceedingly meager of any general desire that it should establish a consolidated nationality.