Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 2.djvu/102

1803. have done an act beyond the Constitution. The Legislature, in casting behind them metaphysical subtleties and risking themselves like faithful servants, must ratify and pay for it, and throw themselves on their country for doing for them unauthorized what we know they would have done for themselves had they been in a situation to do it."

Breckenridge—whose Kentucky Resolutions, hardly five years before, declared that unconstitutional assumptions of power were the surrender of the form of government the people had chosen, and the replacing it by a government which derived its powers from its own will—might be annoyed at finding his principles abandoned by the man who had led him to father them; and surely no leader who had sent to his follower in one year the draft of the Kentucky Resolutions could have expected to send in another the draft of the Louisiana treaty. "I suppose they must then appeal to the nation" were the President's words; and he underscored this ominous phrase. "We shall not be disavowed by the nation, and their act of indemnity will confirm and not weaken the Constitution by more strongly marking out its lines." The Constitution, in dealing with the matter of amendments, made no reference to the Constitution, which invariably spoke of the Union wherever such an expression was needed; and on the Virginia theory Congress had no right to appeal to the nation at all, except as a nation of States, for an amendment. The language