James Blaine

The States are colleagues of one another, and if some of them shall conquer the rest, and hold them as subjugated provinces, it would totally destroy the whole theory upon which they are now connected.

But this is a totally different thing from an offensive war to punish the people for the political misdeeds of their State Government, or to enforce an acknowledgment that the Government of the United States is supreme.

The right of the General Government to preserve itself in its whole constitutional vigor by repelling a direct and positive aggression upon its property or its officers cannot be denied.

Is any portion of the people bound to contribute their money or their blood to carry on a contest like that?

And if Congress shall break up the present Union by unconstitutionally putting strife and enmity and armed hostility between different sections of the country, instead of the domestic tranquility which the Constitution was meant to insure…

If it be true that war cannot be declared, nor a system of general hostilities carried on by the Central Government against a State, then it seems to follow that an attempt to do so would be ipso facto an expulsion of such State from the…

All these provisions are made to protect the States, not to authorize an attack by one part of the country upon another; to preserve the peace, and not to plunge them into civil war.

You can use force only to repel an assault on the public property and aid the Courts in the performance of their duty.

Under such circumstances, to send a military force into any State, with orders to act against the people, would be simply making war upon them.

Without the exercise of those functions which belong exclusively to the civil service, the laws cannot be executed in any event, no matter what may be the physical strength which the Government has at its command.

But what if the feeling in any State against the United States should become so universal that the Federal officers themselves (including judges, district attorneys, and marshals) would be reached by the same influences, and resign their…

On such occasions, especially, the military power must be kept in strict subordination to the civil authority, since it is only in aid of the latter that the former can act at all.

When this contest was over, the day of immaturity had passed and the United States stood before the world a great and permanent Power.

It has been taught to the smaller republics that if this strength be shattered they will be the spoil of foreign arms and the dependent provinces again of foreign monarchs.

The future safety of these continents rests upon the strength and the maintenance of the Union, for had dissolution been possible, events have shown with what small regard the interests or the honor of either of the belligerents would have…

Let the past be the past, but let it be the past with all the instruction and the warning of its experience.

New days bring new issues and old passions are unsafe counselors.

The interest and ambition of states, like those of men, will disturb the moral sense and incline to one side or the other the strict balance of impartial justice.

The relations of nations are not and should not be governed by sentiment.

Is there any reason that will satisfactorily account for His Lordship's abandonment of this ideal relation of friendship between the two countries except that he saw a speedier way of adding to the power of England by conniving at the…

In the thirteen intervening years between that date and the outbreak of the Southern Rebellion we had grown enormously in wealth, our Pacific possessions had shown an extraordinary production of precious metals, our population had…

Is it not strange that, even with such apprehensions, the destruction of the Union was so welcome in England that it blinded the eyes of her statesmen and her people?

But surely European statesmen, without miraculous foresight, might have anticipated that its success would have been more dangerous than its defeat, and that the conservative strength of the Union might be even to them an influence of good…

Firmly seated in Mexico, it would have spread through Central America to the Isthmus, controlling all canal communications between the two oceans which were the boundaries of the Union, while its growth upon the Pacific Coast would have…