Page:Debates in the Several State Conventions, v3.djvu/482

466 confidence, and diminished that mutual friendship, which contributed to carry us through the war.

The honorable gentlemen observe that Congress might do fine punishments, from petty larceny to high treason. This is an unfortunate quotation for the gentleman, because treason is expressly defined in the 3d section of the 3d article, and they can add no feature to it. They have not cognizance over any other crime except piracies, felonies committed on the high seas, and offences against the law of nations.

But the rhetoric of the gentleman has highly colored the dangers of giving the general government an indefinite power of providing for the general welfare. I contend that no such power is given. They have power "to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defence and general welfare of the United States." Is this an independent, separate, substantive power, to provide for the general welfare of the United States? No, sir. They can lay and collect taxes, &c. For what? To pay the debts and provide for the general welfare. Were not this the case, the following part of the clause would be absurd. It would have been treason against common language. Take it altogether, and let me ask if the plain interpretation be not this—a power to lay and collect taxes, &c., in order to provide for the general welfare and pay debts.

On the subject of a bill of rights, the want of which has been complained of, I will observe that it has been sanctified by such reverend authority, that I feel some difficulty in going against it. I shall not, however, be deterred from giving my opinion on this occasion, let the consequence be what it may. At the beginning of the war, we had no certain bill of rights; for our charter cannot be considered as a bill of rights; it is nothing more than an investiture, in the hands of the Virginia citizens, of those rights which belonged to British subjects. When the British thought proper to infringe our rights, was it not necessary to mention, in our Constitution, those rights which ought to be paramount to the power of the legislature? Why is the bill of rights distinct from the Constitution? I consider bills of rights in this view—that the government should use them, when there is a departure from its fundamental principles, in order to restore them.