“It would have been puerile,” says he, “for the Constitution to say formally to each State, thou shalt not secede.” There was no necessity, perhaps, that the Convention should have been very formal in the language it addressed to the States. But would it have been puerile, or ridiculous, if the Convention had said, “the Union shall be perpetual.” Who can doubt that if these words had been inserted in the new Constitution, that Mr. Motley would have wielded them as an unanswerable argument against the right of secession? Indeed, these words answer that purpose so well, that Dr. Hodge borrow
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