The federation binds them
always to fight on the same side; and if they have such feelings
towards one another, or such diversity of feeling towards their
neighbours, that they would generally prefer to fight on opposite
sides, the federal tie is neither likely to be of long duration, not
to be well observed while it subsists. The sympathies available for
the purpose are those of race, language, religion, and, above all,
of political institutions, as conducing most to a feeling of
identity of political interest. When a few free states, separately
insufficient for their own defence, are hemmed in on all sides by
military or feudal monarchs, who hate and despise freedom even in a
neighbour, those states have no chance for preserving liberty and
its blessings but by a federal union. The common interest arising from
this cause has in Switzerland, for several centuries, been found
adequate to maintain efficiently the federal bond, in spite not only
of difference of religion when religion was the grand source of
irreconcilable political enmity throughout Europe, but also in spite
of great weakness in the constitution of the federation itself. In
America, where all the conditions for the maintenance of union existed
at the highest point, with the sole drawback of difference of
institutions in the single but most important article of Slavery, this
one difference has gone so far in alienating from each other's
sympathies the two divisions of the Union, that the maintenance or
disruption of a tie of so much value to them both depends on the issue
of an obstinate civil war.
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