James Blaine: “It was simply a bribe, cunningly and unscrupulously contrived, to induce the people of Kansas to accept a pro-slavery…”

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?

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.

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…