The Attitude of the South [pp. 25-31]

rr THE ATTITUDE OF THE SOUTH.
25
ready given, in this essay, enough food for thought to our
readers to puzzle them for a month.
ART. III.-THE ATTITUDE OF THE SOUTH.
"Ye would be dupes and victims,[and ye are."-Veiled Prophet.
THE Constitution of the United States, as administered under
the federal government, is a practical absolutism. Theoretically viewed, it ranks among the most celebrated monuments
of political wisdom, yielding not even to the august polity of
the papacy, the proud Venetian governments or the celebrated
Constitutions of Clarendon; but, perverted from the objects
of its original institution, it assumes, under the autocracy of
the' majority power, the shape of an unmitigated absolutism.
As such it was denounced by Calhoun, by McDuffie, by Hayne,
and, indeed, by that entire school of noble and patriotic Southern statesmen who preferred independence to power, and were
not abject or venal enough, to hawk their principles through
federal thoroughfares, nor barter their large honors for the
paltry consideration of glittering national baubles. The government of the Union they believed to be a government, not of
the numerical, but of the concurrent or constitutional mnajority- not a government of the popular masses of the nation,
considered as a unit, but of the popular majorities of the States,
regarded as sovereigns; and the compact of Union Was binding not over, but between these sovereign powers; and being
peers, in political rights, they themselves were the constitutional judges, in the last resort, of the terms and conditions of
the national compact. The National, Consolidation, or Union
party maintain the opposite of these views, and base their
conceptions of correct constitutional construction upon the
visionary and fanatical doctrines of Rousseau, and the French
Revolutionists, who make the principle of Individualism the
basis of social organization, and, in effect, assert the supremacy of natural rights over and above the ordinary conven.
tions of civil society. But it were a waste of time to attempt
to show the absurdity of this most heretical and incendiary
doctrine. It has been completely exploded by the illustrious
Cormte, in his Positive Philosophy, where he demonstrates
that the family, and not the individual, is the tirue type of
the social union-Individualism having no social recognition,
save in the imaginations of political dreamers. But in spite
of these evident truths, it must be owned that the open and
ingenuous spirit of the South has been overreached by the