Page:Nature and Character of our Federal Government.djvu/72

 and independent capacities, and not the power of the people of the United States, as contradistinguished from them. For congress was, as we have already remarked, strictly the representative of the States; and each State, being entitled to one vote, and one only, was precisely equal, in the deliberations of that body, to each other State. Nothing less, therefore, than a majority of the States, could have carried the measure in question, even in congress. But, surely there can be no doubt that the power to change their common government was reserved to the States alone, when we see it expressly provided that nothing less than their unanimous consent, as States, should be sufficient to effect that object.

There is yet another view of this subject. It results from the nature of all government, freely and voluntarily established, that there is no power to change, except the power which formed it. It will scarcely be denied by any one, that the confederation was a government strictly of the States, formed by them as such, and deriving all its powers from their consent and agreement. What authority was there, superior to the States, which could undo their work? What power was there, other than that of the States themselves, which was authorized to declare that their solemn league and agreement should be abrogated? Could a majority of the people of all the States have done it? If so, whence did they derive that right? Certainly not from any agreement among the States, or the people of all the States; and it could not be legitimately derived from any other source. If, therefore, they had exercised such a power, it would have been a plain act of usurpation and violence. Besides, if we may judge from the apportionment of representation as proposed in the convention, a majority of the people of all the States were to be found in the four *States of Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia; so, that, upon this idea, the people of less than one-third of all the States could change the articles of confederation, although those articles expressly provided that they should not be changed without the consent of all the States! There was, then, no power superior to the power of the States; and, consequently, there was no power which could alter or abolish the government which they had established. If the Constitution has superseded