Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 2.djvu/125

108 which this admission gives to a Southern and Western interest is contradictory to the principles of our original Union." The President and Senate had no power to make States, and the treaty was void.


 * "I have no doubt but we can obtain territory either by conquest or compact, and hold it, even all Louisiana and a thousand times more if you please, without violating the Constitution. We can hold territory; but to admit the inhabitants into the Union, to make citizens of them, and States, by treaty, we cannot constitutionally do; and no subsequent act of legislation, or even ordinary amendment to our Constitution, can legalize such measures.  If done at all, they must be done by universal consent of all the States or partners to our political association; and this universal consent I am positive can never be obtained to such a pernicious measure as the admission of Louisiana,—of a world, and such a world, into our Union.  This would be absorbing the Northern States, and rendering them as insignificant in the Union as they ought to be, if by their own consent the measure should be adopted."

Tracy’s speech was answered by Breckenridge of Kentucky, who had induced the Kentucky legislature, only five years before, to declare itself determined "tamely to submit to undelegated, and consequently unlimited, powers in no man or body of men on earth;" and to assert further that submission to the exercise of such powers "would be to surrender the form of government we have chosen, and to live under one deriving its powers from its own will, and not from our authority." When he came to deal with