Page:Federalist, Dawson edition, 1863.djvu/347

 should reside in the States, to insert negative clauses prohibiting the exercise of them by the States. The tenth Section of the first Article consists altogether of such provisions. This circumstance is a clear indication of the sense of the Convention, and furnishes a rule of interpretation out of the body of the Act, which justifies the position I have advanced, and refutes every hypothesis to the contrary. The last clause of the eighth Section of the first Article of the plan under consideration authorizes the National Legislature "to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the powers by that Constitution vested in the Government of the United States, or in any department or officer thereof;" and the second clause of the sixth Article declares, "that the Constitution and the laws of the United States made in pursuance thereof, and the treaties made by their authority, shall be the supreme law of the land; anything in the constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding."

These two clauses have been the source of much virulent invective, and petulant declamation, against the proposed Constitution. They have been held up to the people in all the exaggerated colors of misrepresentation; as the pernicious engines by which their local Governments were to be destroyed, and their liberties exterminated; as the hideous monster whose devouring jaws would spare neither sex nor age, nor high nor low, nor sacred nor profane; and yet, strange as it may appear, after all this clamor, to those who may not have happened to contemplate them in the same light, it may be affirmed with perfect confidence, that the constitutional operation of the intended Government would be precisely the same, if these clauses were entirely obliterated, as if they were repeated in every Article. They are only declaratory of a truth, which would have 