Page:Contemporary Opinion of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, p1.djvu/17

 "The Federal Government is, as the term imports, a confederation of States, and the People of each State have transferred to the United States, such a portion of their power as is, in the Constitution specified, to be exercised by Congress, and have reserved the Remainder to the States, to be exercised by their respective Legislatures &hellip; From the distribution of power in the Federal and State Constitutions, it appears that Congress are the proper guardians of the one, and the State Legislatures of the others, and while the individual States retain any portion of their sovereignty, they must have the right to judge of any infringement made on their Constitutions, for if the right is transferred exclusively to Congress, or to any department of the General Government, no vestige of sovereignty can remain to the individual States, but they become a consolidated instead of a Federal Government, and the oath and declaration required by our Constitution, will remain a lasting monument of the inconsistency of a People who require of their Agents an oath to defend, without a right to judge whether it is attacked."

This, certainly, is not much short of the remedial doctrines of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions. At the conclusion of this speech the vote was taken and the report was accepted.

The action of the General Court was, of course, quite differently received by the Federalist and Republican papers of Boston. Before the report had been considered in either house the Centinel had confidently announced that what such a committee should report "must be correct." When both houses had stamped the report with the seal of their approval the elation of the Centinel knew no bounds; the document will be "an everlasting record of the Wisdom, Patriotism and enlightened Policy of the present times. . . . Indeed, he who now doubts the rectitude of such principles must be worse than an infidel."

When political fanaticism reaches the pitch of arrogance displayed by this remark of the Centinel and by that of the Federalist member of the House, who stigmatized his Republican opponents as a "contemptible minority," one need not be surprised to find Republican dissent, however modest its expression, treated in a summary fashion. The tone of the Chronicle, tested by the standard set in the Centinel and other Federalist papers, was a model for fairness and courtesy towards its opponents; measured even by the standards of today, there was little in its tone to which exception might fairly be taken. But this moderation did not secure its publishers from persecution for persistently adhering to their political convictions. Within a week after the passage of the Massachusetts reply to Virginia and Kentucky, provocation for an attack upon the Chronicle was found in two articles that appeared on February 18. In one of these a correspondent observed that in May 1798 Massachusetts was a "free, sovereign and independent state" except in