Page:Debates in the Several State Conventions, v1.djvu/407

Rh avenger between them, no alterations are to be made in those Articles, unless, after they are approved by Congress, they are agreed to, and ratified, by the legislature of every state; but by the resolve of the Convention, this Constitution is not to be ratified by the legislature of the respective states, but is to be submitted to conventions chosen by the people, and, if ratified by them, is to be binding.

This resolve was opposed, among others, by the delegation of Maryland. Your delegates were of opinion that, as the form of government proposed was, if adopted, most essentially to alter the Constitution of this state, and as our Constitution had pointed out a mode by which, and by which only, alterations were to be made therein, a convention of the people could not be called to agree to and ratify the said form of government without a direct violation of our Constitution, which it is the duty of every individual in this state to protect and support. In this opinion all your delegates who were attending were unanimous. I, sir, opposed it also upon a more extensive ground, as being directly contrary to the mode of altering our federal government, established in our original compact; and as such, being a direct violation of the mutual faith plighted by the states to each other, I gave it my negative.

I was of opinion that the states, considered as states, in their political capacity, are the members of a federal government—that the states in their political capacity, or as sovereignties, are entitled, and only entitled, originally to agree upon the form of, and submit themselves to, a federal government, and afterwards, by mutual consent, to dissolve or alter it—that every thing which relates to the formation, the dissolution, or the alteration, of a federal government over states equally free, sovereign, and independent, is the peculiar province of the states in their sovereign or political capacity, in the same manner as what relates to forming alliances or treaties of peace, amity, or commerce; and that the people at large, in their individual capacity, have no more right to interfere in the one case than in the other—that according to these principles we originally acted in forming our Confederation. It was the states as states, by their representatives in Congress, that formed the Articles of Confederation; it was the states as states, by their legislatures, who ratified those Articles; and it was there established and provided that the states as states (that is, by their legislatures) should agree to any alterations that should here- after be proposed in the federal government, before they should be binding: and any alterations agreed to in any other manner cannot release the states from the obligation they are under to each other by virtue of the original Articles of Confederation. The people of the different states never made any objection to the manner in which the Articles of Confederation were formed or ratified, or to the mode by which alterations were to be made in that government; with the rights of their respective states they wished not to interfere. Nor do I believe the people, in their individual capacity, would ever have expected or desired to have been appealed to on the present occasion, in violation of the rights of their respective states, if the favorers of the proposed Constitution, imagining they had a better chance of forcing it to be adopted by a hasty appeal to the people at large, (who could not be so good judges of the dangerous consequence,) had not insisted upon this mode. Nor do these positions in the least interfere with the principle, that all power originates from the people; because, when once the people have exercised their power in establishing and forming themselves into a state government, it never devolves back to them; nor have they a right to