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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from First Inaugural Address by Abraham Lincoln: endure forever--it being impossible to destroy it except by some action
not provided for in the instrument itself.
Again, if the United States be not a government proper, but an association
of States in the nature of contract merely, can it, as a contract,
be peaceably unmade by less than all the parties who made it?
One party to a contract may violate it--break it, so to speak;
but does it not require all to lawfully rescind it?
Descending from these general principles, we find the proposition
that in legal contemplation the Union is perpetual confirmed by
the history of the Union itself. The Union is much older than
the Constitution. It was formed, in fact, by the Articles of
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