Now the Secessionists went further than Calhoun had ever found occasion to go. They proposed to break up the nation, at first by the withdrawal of their separate States, to be followed by the organization of a Southern Confederacy. Their grievance was the restriction of their industrial system, and its threatened destruction, and the failure of the Union to serve its proper ends of justice and fraternity. But they wholly disclaimed any revolutionary action. They maintained that the withdrawal of their States was an exercise of their strictly legal and constitutional right. This is the plea which is insistently and strenuously urged by their defenders. Their foremost actors in the drama, Davis and Stephens, became at a later day its historians, not so much to record its events, as to plead with elaboration and reiteration that Secession was a constitutional right. But all their fine-spun reasoning ran dead against a force which it could no more overcome than King Canute's words could halt the tide,--the fact of American unity, as realized in the hearts of the American people. The mass of men live not by logic, but by primal instincts and passions. Where one man could explain why the nation was an indestructible organism rather than a partnership dissoluble at will, a thousand men could and would fight to prevent the nation from being dissolved. But here and there on this planet is a man who must think things through to the end, and have a solid reason for what he does. Such a man was Abraham Lincoln. He never could rest contented till he had worked the problem out clearly in his own head, and then had stated the answer in words that the common man could understand. Such an answer to the whole Secessionist argument, quite apart from the slavery question, he gave in one brief paragraph of his inaugural. "There is no alternative for continuing the government but acquiescence on the one side or the other. If the minority in such a case will secede rather than acquiesce, they make a precedent which in turn will ruin and divide them; for a minority of their own will secede from them, whenever a majority refuses to be controlled by such a minority. For instance, why not any portion of a new Confederacy, a year or so hence, arbitrarily secede again, precisely as portions of the present Union now claim to secede from it? All who cherish disunion sentiments are now being educated to the exact temper of doing this. Is there such perfect identity of interests among the States to compose a new Union as to produce harmony only, and prevent renewed Secession? Plainly, the central idea of Secession is the essence of anarchy." That was the key-word of the situation, in the court of reason and conscience,--"the central idea of Secession is the essence of anarchy."