But a free government returns to the people all that it receives from them. From the masses there converges, through a thousand channels, to the central government, both the elements of national strength, viz., authority to act, and the means of carrying out this authority, that is, money and military service—the body, of which the popular will and authority is the soul. The people declare their will that such and such individuals shall be clothed with, and represent their united power, and act for them in this representative capacity. The persons thus chosen, and who constitute the government or central head, with its subordinate agencies, declare from this central position of authority with which they have been invested by the people, that such and such things are necessary for the welfare and orderly activity of the people, and in the name, and with the coöperation of the people, they will to carry these measures out.
Thus life, energy, power, from the people, flow from all points to the government, to the centre; and from the government it flows back again to the people as order, as the force that arranges, methodizes, harmonizes, and regulates the outflow of the popular energies in all the departments of human activity. It clears the channels of national industry of all obstacles. By its legislative, judicial, and executive functions, it establishes, on the one hand, common methods of action among multitudes having common interests and aims, and thus obviates clashing and confusion; and, on the other, it punishes those who would interfere with and obstruct or destroy this order.
The government is the concentrated will and intelligence of the people, directed to the wise guidance of the national life—directed to the harmonizing of the diversified activity and industry of the nation, to the opening of all possible channels for that activity, and to the removal of everything that would obstruct and counteract the nation's utmost development and progress.
In this way, a free government exhibits, as far as human imperfection admits, the union of the two great principles, liberty and order. The people are free to think, talk, write, and act as they see fit; but since there can be no liberty, but only license, or lawlessness, without order—without beneficent methods, symmetrical forms and arrangements, in which that liberty can be enjoyed by individuals and communities, without conflicting with other individuals and communities, parts of the same free whole—therefore government is created by the people to prescribe and maintain this order, essential to this common liberty; an order which is the form, or forms, under which both individuals and communities shall act, singly or in concert, in the countless relations in which the members of the same community or nation come into contact with each other.
Now, in the United States, the chart of this orderly and symmetrical network of political arrangements for the free movement among each other of the individuals in the township, of the townships in the county, of the counties in the State, and of the States in the Union—and within the protecting lines of which political arrangements, the people are enabled to pursue their industrial avocations without mutual interference and collision, and to attend in peace and security to all the employments that tend to elevate, refine, and freely develop the individual man (for government is only and solely a means to this great end)—the chart, we say, of all these orderly arrangements, is our immortal national Constitution, together with the State constitutions that cluster around it, as their centre, axis, and support.
Through each State constitution, the national and central one sends down an iron arm, clasping them all by a firm bond to itself and to each other. And in each, the grasp of this arm is riveted and double riveted, above and below, by these two comprehensive, unmistakable articles, without which the others had else been valueless; and for which the framers of this great instrument are entitled to our lasting gratitude and admiration.
The articles are these, viz.: Art. 6th, sec. 2d: 'This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof ... shall be the supreme law of the land ... anything in the constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.'
And art. 4th, sec. 4th: 'The United States shall guarantee to every State in the Union a republican form of government, and shall protect each of them against invasion....'
The first of these admits of no separation or secession. The second preserves everywhere that form of government under which alone the fullest political freedom can be enjoyed. In fighting, then, for the Constitution, we fight for an undivided Union on the one hand, and, on the other, for a Union that guarantees to each member of it that form of government which secures the greatest liberty to those who live under it. May we not, we say again, rest in an all but certain hope that the Divine Being will see fit to preserve His own work? For such, though accomplished through human agency, we feel constrained to believe, have been this Union and its remarkable constitution.
We have regarded the Union as the culmination of a long series of endeavors, so to call them, on the part of Providence, to bring men from a social condition characterized by the multiplicity, diversity, separation, antagonism, and hostility of independent, warring, petty states, into that larger, higher form of political and social life, that shall combine in itself the three conditions of unity—variety in unity, and of the utmost liberty with order—as the soul and life of the political body. And that it has also been the aim of Providence, in the formation of this Union, to accomplish the above object on as large a scale as possible, in the present moral and intellectual condition of the race.