Page:John P. Branch Historical Papers - Volume 2.djvu/302

Rh the part of the states was not to avoid the degradation of the said states by being carried into the courts of another government. It infers this because that jurisdiction is still ceded as to controversies between two states, or a state and a foreign state. As to these, the jurisdiction is strictly proper, the courts of neither party being competent to bind the other, and forms a just exception from the principle above stated. But the case contemplated by the eleventh amendment is of another character. There was no reason to yield up the sovereign rights of the states to individuals of other states, when it was withheld from our own citizens, and when our citizens did not receive a correspondent favor in other states or countries. It is clearly an error, therefore, to infer that this objection did not prevail with the states in relation to a case in which it forcibly and emphatically existed, because it was relinquished in another case in which it could not have been justly urged.

The court says there must be some other cause than the dignity of the state, which produced this amendment. That other cause was the great principle just alluded to, As it is asserted, that the dignity of the state was not the real cause of the opposition the assertion is promptly denied. In the biography of the patriotic Governor Hancock, in the Sanderson series, said on good authority to have been written by John Adams, it is said that the former “in favoring a confederate republic, did not vindicate with less scrupulousness the dignity of the individual states, and that in a suit brought against the state of Massachusetts in the court of the United States in which he was summoned as Governor to answer the prosecution, he resisted the process and maintained inviolate the of the commonwealth.” As to the sense of the commonwealth of