Page:Nature and Character of our Federal Government.djvu/77

 permanent subsistence of parties having an independent right to construe, control and judge of its obligations. If in this latter sense, it is to be deemed a compact, it must be, either because it contains, on its face, stipulations to that effect, or because it is necessarily implied, from the nature and objects of a frame of government."

There is a want of appositeness and accuracy in the first sentence of this extract, which renders it somewhat difficult to determine whether the author designed it as a single proposition, or as a series of independent propositions. If the first, there is not one person in the United States, it is presumed, who would venture to differ from him. I confess, however, that I do not very clearly discern what bearing it has on the question he was examining. It involves no point of difference between political parties, nor does it propound any question which has heretofore been contested, or which may be expected to arise hereafter, touching the true nature of the Constitution. If he *designed a series of propositions, then the two first are so obviously false, that the author himself would not venture to maintain them, and the last is so obviously true, that no one would dream of denying it. For example. He can scarcely mean to say that our government is not a "contract," whether made by the States as such, or by "the people of the United States;" and it is perfectly clear that it "contemplates the permanent subsistence of the parties to it," whoever those parties may be. These two propositions, therefore, taken distinctly, are not true in themselves, and neither of them was necessary, as qualifying or forming a part of the third. And, as to the third, it is not easy to see why he announced it, since it never entered into the conception of any one, that the parties to the Constitution had "an independent right," as a general right, "to construe, control or judge of its obligations." We all admit that the power and authority of the federal government, within its constitutional sphere, are superior to those of the States, in some instances, and co-ordinate in others, and that every citizen is under an absolute obligation to render them respect and obedience; and this simply because his own State, by the act of ratifying the Constitution, has commanded him to do so. We all admit it to be true, as a general proposition, that no citizen