Page:Debates in the Several State Conventions, v4.djvu/532

516 of the constitutional rights of the states, and the liberties of the citizen (sanctioned by Congress and the Supreme Court,) which he would believe it to be the right and duty of a state to resist? Does he contend for the doctrine "of passive obedience and non-resistance?" Would he justify an open resistance to an act of Congress, sanctioned by the courts, which should abolish the trial by jury, or destroy the freedom of religion, or the freedom of the press? Yes, sir, he would advocate resistance in such cases; and so would I, and so would all of us. But such resistance would, according to this doctrine, be revolution; it would be rebellion. According to my opinion, it would be just, legal, and constitutional resistance. The whole difference between us, then, consists in this: the gentleman would make force the only arbiter in all cases of collision between the states and the federal government; I would resort to a peaceful remedy—the interposition of the state to "arrest the progress of the evil," until such times as "a convention (assembled at the call of Congress or two thirds of the states) shall decide to which they mean to give an authority claimed by two of their organs." Sir, I say, with Mr. Jefferson, (whose words I have here borrowed,) that "it is the peculiar wisdom and felicity of our Constitution to have provided this peaceable appeal, where that of other nations" (and I may add that of the gentleman) "is at once to force."

Mr. WEBSTER, in some closing remarks, said a few words on the constitutional argument, which the honorable gentleman (Mr. Hayne) labored to reconstruct.

His argument consists of two propositions, and an inference. His propositions are—

1. That the Constitution is a compact between the states.

2. That a compact between two, with authority reserved to one to interpret its terms, would be a surrender, to that one, of all power whatever.

3. Therefore (such is his inference) the general government does not possess the authority to construe its own powers.

Now, sir, who does not see, without the aid of exposition or detection, the utter confusion of ideas involved in this so elaborate and systematic argument?

The Constitution, it is said, is a compact between states: the states, then, and the states only, are parties to the compact. How comes the general government itself a party? Upon the honorable gentleman's hypothesis, the general government is the result of the compact, the creature of the compact, not one of the parties to it. Yet the argument, as the gentleman has now stated it, makes the government itself one of its own creators. It makes it a party to that compact to which it owes its own existence.

For the purpose of erecting the Constitution on the basis of a compact, the gentleman considers the states as parties to that compact; but as soon as his compact is made, then he chooses to consider the general government, which is the offspring of that compact, not its offspring, but one of its parties; and so, being a party, has not the power of judging on the terms of compact.

If the whole of the gentleman's main proposition were conceded to him—that is to say, if I admit, for the sake of the argument, that the Constitution is a compact between states,—the inferences which he draws from that proposition are warranted by no just reason; because, if the