Page:Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (1st ed, 1833, vol I).djvu/369

 CH. III.] government. The Virginia Resolutions of 1798, assert, that "Virginia views the powers of the federal government, as resulting from the compact, to which the states are parties." This declaration was, at the time, matter of much debate and difference of opinion among the ablest representatives in the legislature. But when it was subsequently expounded by Mr. Madison in the celebrated Report of January, 1800, after admitting, that the term "states" is used in different senses, and among others, that it sometimes means the people composing a political society in their highest sovereign capacity, he considers the resolution unobjectionable, at least in this last sense, because in that sense the constitution was submitted to the "states"; in that sense the "states" ratified it; and in that sense the states are consequently parties to the compact, from which the powers of the federal government result. And that is the sense, in which he considers the states parties in his still later and more deliberate examinations.

§ 362. This view of the subject is, however, wholly at variance with that, on which we are commenting; and which, having no foundation in the words of the constitution, is altogether a gratuitous assumption, and therefore inadmissible. It is no more true, that a state is a party to the constitution, as such, because it was framed by delegates chosen by the states, and submitted by the legislatures thereof to the people of the states for ratification, and that the states are necessary agents to give effect to some of its provisions, than that 42