Excerpt from A Letter to a Friend in a Slave State My dear - Everybody recollects the turn given to the idea that the fence of the law cannot be made perfect, when the Englishman said he never saw an Act of Parliament he could not drive his coach through; now signalized, alas! but a thousand years to soon, in the illustrious instance of the Constitution of the United States. Any one or more of the States which drove into this great work may drive out again by the Southern road, and we are taught by lessons, both Legislative and Executive, that as long as the States which remain to us are united, the Constitution is unwounded, though the Northern chariot and scythes be driven through every clause of it. What the South accomplishes at a blow, we do piecemeal. Eight millions of people hold that, if a State had called a convention and asked of the Federal Government a boon, which was refused, or being refused nothing whatever, had expressed a preference to live alone, they might make their act of constitutional secession, and bow themselves out of the Union. Nor would it be possible to exaggerate the heresies of those that are leading the fortunes of the other eighteen millions, who assail, in his liberty and property, the plainest rights of the citizen; who mean to consolidate the Government, if they can, and whose schemes for the consolidation of large parts of it, are already before Congress. These are the extremes of thought and action that accompany national calamity. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.