I do not believe that there are many Americans of the present generation who would support the proposition that the South was inherently right and the North was inherently wrong in that great conflict. There were, at the time when the sections were arrayed in arms against each other, and there may still be, differences of opinion as to the _legal_ right of secession under the Constitution of the United States, but the inherent right of a people of a State to throw off at will their allegiance to the Federal Union and resume complete sovereignty over the territory of the State was never urged as a conclusive argument. It was the legal right and not the natural right which was emphasized as justifying those who took up arms in order to disrupt the Union. But if an American citizen denies that the principle of "self-determination" can be rightfully applied to the affairs of his own country, how can he consistently maintain that it is a right inseparable from a true conception of political liberty and therefore universally applicable, just in principle, and wise from the practical point of view? Of course, those who subscribe to "self-determination" and advocate it as a great truth fundamental to every political society organized to protect and promote civil liberty, do not claim it for races, peoples, or communities whose state of barbarism or ignorance deprive them of the capacity to choose intelligently their political affiliations. As to peoples or communities, however, who do possess the intelligence to make a rational choice of political allegiance, no exception is made, so far as words go, to the undeviating application of the principle. It is the affirmation of an unqualified right. It is one of those declarations of principle which sounds true, which in the abstract may be true, and which appeals strongly to man's innate sense of moral right and to his conception of natural justice, but which, when the attempt is made to apply it in every case, becomes a source of political instability and domestic disorder and not infrequently a cause of rebellion.