Restricted What Is Our Constitution, - League, Pact, Or Government?

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WHAT IS OUR CONSTITUTION, -LEAGUE, PACT, OR GOVERNMENT?
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What is our Constitution,--league, pact, or government? Two lectures on the Constitution of the United States concluding a course on the modern state, delivered in the law school of Columbia College, during the winter of 1860 and 1861, to which is appended an address on secession written in the year 1851
by Lieber, Francis, 1800-1872
Yes that Francis Lieber who wrote the Lieber Code. We see a lot of secessionist speeches in that time span. Let's see what Lieber has to say in response to the secessionists.

Having classified the constitutions of modern states, and discussed the characteristic features of the most prominent European fundamental laws, we now approach the question: What is the Constitution of the United States? Do the States form a league? Or is the Constitution a pact, a contract—political partnership of contracting parties? Do we live in a confederacy? and if so, in a confederacy of what degree of unitedness? Or is the Constitution a framework of government for a united country—a political organism of a people, with its own vitality and self-sufficing energy? Do we form a union or an aggregate of partners at pleasure?​

These are momentous questions—not only interesting in an historical or scientific point of view, but important as questions of political life and social existence, of public conscience, of riglit and truth in the higliest spheres of human action and of our civilization. At no time has the very character and essence of our Constitution been so much discussed as in ours. Never before have measures of such importance been so made to depend, in appearance, upon the fundamental character of the documentcalled the Constitution ofthe United States, while never before have those in liigli authority attended less to its genesis, its contents, and its various provisions, in order to jus- tify actions aftecting our entire polity. Never before, either in our own, or in the history of our race, have whole communities seemed to make acts of elementary and national consequence depend upon a single term ; upon the question whether, the Constitution is a mere contract, or whether the word, derived as it is from constituere, must be understood in the sense in which Cicero takes it, when he speaks of constituere rempublicam—that is, organizing the common weal, putting it in order and connecting all the parts in mutual organic dependence upon one another.

I have used the words apparently and seemingly, because it admits of little doubt, if of any, that those among the leaders in the present disturbances who make a world of consequences depend upon the solitary question, Is or is not the Constitution of the United States a contract I argue on a foregone conclusion. Or is there a man living who believes that they would give up their pursuit of disunion, if it would be proved, by evidence ever so fair, substantial, and free from embittering passion, that the Constitution is not a compact, or is not a mere contract ?



 
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