Page:Nature and Character of our Federal Government.djvu/80

, nor presented any such analysis of it in any respect, as to enable the reader to form any satisfactory conclusion as to its true character in the particular under consideration. Every thing which he has urged as argument to prove his proposition, may well be true, and every sentence of the Constitution, which he has cited for that purpose, may be allowed its full effect, and yet our government may be a compact, even in the strictest sense in which he has understood the term.

His first argument is, that the "United States were no strangers to compacts of this nature," and that those who ratified the Constitution, if they had meant it as a compact, would have used "appropriate terms" to convey that idea. I have already shown that if he means by this, that the Constitution would have contained some express declaration to that effect, he is altogether inaccurate. He himself knows, as a judge, that a deed, or other instrument, receives its distinctive character, not from the name which the parties may choose to give to it, but from its legal effect and operation. The same rule applies to constitutions. Ours is a compact or not, precisely as its provisions make it so, or otherwise. The question, who are the parties to it, may influence, and ought to influence, the construction of it in this respect; and I propose presently to show, from this and other views of it, that it is, in its nature, "a mere confederation," and not a consolidated government, in any one respect. It does, therefore, contain "appropriate terms," if we take those words in an enlarged sense, to convey the idea of a compact.

Our author supposes, however, that a "conclusive" argument upon this subject is furnished by that clause of the Constitution which declares that "This Constitution, and the laws of the United States, which shall be made in pursuance thereof, and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every State, shall be bound thereby, any thing in the constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding." Hence he concludes that "the *people of any State cannot, by any form of its own constitution or laws, or other proceedings, repeal, or abrogate or suspend it."

Here again the author displays a want of proper definiteness