Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/442

 410 Calhoujis principles. [i860 people of the several States, forming distinct political communities and acting in their separate and sovereign capacity, and not from all of the people forming one aggregate political community ; that the Constitution of the United States is, in fact, a compact, to which each State is a party, in the character already described ; that the several States, or parties, have a right to judge of its infractions; and, in case of a deliberate, palpable, and dangerous exercise of power not delegated, have the right also, in the last resort (to use the language of the Virginia Resolutions), ' to interpose for arresting the progress of the evil, and for maintaining, within their respective limits, the authorities, rights, and liberties appertaining to them.'"' Madison had framed the Virginia Resolutions, as Virginia's protest against the Alien and Sedition Laws of 1798, which he considered "a deliberate, palpable, and dangerous exercise of power not delegated " by the Constitution, either explicitly or by reasonable implication; but he was still living when Calhoun put forth his doctrine of nullification, in imitation, as he supposed, of the precedent, and on the firm ground of the "good old Republican doctrine of '98," and he emphatically denied having meant by his doctrine what Calhoun meant by his principle of virtual resistance. The resolutions which Kentucky had adopted in 1798 were nearer Calhoun's tone and meaning. They had declared that in case of a deliberate, palpable, and dangerous exercise of unconstitutional powers by the Federal government, " as in all other cases of compact between parties having no common judge, each party has an equal right to judge for itself, as well of the infractions as of the mode and measure of redress." But even these might be read as the terms of agitation rather than as those of revolution. The States were the only organic bodies capable of authoritative action outside the organisation of the Federal government itself, and they had seemed to the statesmen of Virginia and Kentucky the natural and proper instruments of agitation in cases where the action of the Federal government called for organised, though peaceful and constitutional, opposition and a concerted effort for redress. Calhoun's thought went much further. He conceived the States to be the only members of the Union. The people had no citizenship, as it seemed to him, except in the States under whose authority they were grouped. They had no direct connexion with the Federal government, but dealt with it, and acted in its affairs, in communities. The Union was a Union of States, and the people acted in its affairs, not directly and as a nation, but segregately, by joint action, as sovereign but associated commonwealths. The States, there- fore, as the sole constituent members of the Union, were not only the natural and proper agencies of agitation ; they were the only proper, the only possible parties to a change. The initiative was theirs by con- stituent right: and each of them must look for itself to the keeping of the general compact, acting upon its own individual responsibility.