Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 1.djvu/53

Rh ers, or take without hindrance what powers it pleases, then it may as well have had originally all powers, without the mockery of a verbal limitation. Mr. Jefferson deprecated &quot;usurpation of the powers retained by the States, interpolations into the compact, and direct infractions of it, &quot; and as late as 1825, solemnly asserted that though a dissolution of the Union would be a great calamity, submission to a government of unlimited powers would be a greater. Under our written Constitution, the powers of the government were distributed among several co-ordinate departments and instead of being left to be scrambled for were defined with such precision that generally each may ascertain its own, unless blinded by ambition or partisanship or selfishness. The jurisdiction of each is limited to certain enumerated objects, and this division, with checks and balances, was to prevent the evils Jefferson deplored, and which have always attended irresponsible and ill-defined authority.

As the written Constitution, with all its superiority to unwritten usage, is not self-executory, the practical and vital question continually arises, who is to guard and enforce its limitations and who is the ultimate arbiter in case of dangerous infractions? The famous Kentucky resolutions of 1798, drawn by Jefferson, affirm that the States composing the Union are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general government; that each State, while delegating certain definite powers to that government, reserved the residuary mass of right to their own self-government, and that the government created by the compact to which each State acceded as a State and is an integral party, was not made the exclusive or final judge of the powers delegated to itself, since that would have made its discretion and not the Constitution the measure of its powers. In 1799 he reaffirmed the declaration and added that the principle that the general government was the exclusive judge of the powers delegated to it stopped nothing short of despotism.