Page:Nature and Character of our Federal Government.djvu/83

 There are few minds, I think, prepared to embrace this conclusion, or to discern the connection which it has with the premises. There are still fewer who will not feel surprise, that our author should have formed such a conclusion, since an instance to disprove it, furnished by the history of his own country, and existing in his own times, had but just passed under his critical examination and review.

The remaining arguments upon this point are merely inferences drawn from the absence of express words in the Constitution, or from *the opinions of members of the various conventions, expressed in the debates concerning it. These have already been sufficiently examined. Taking his whole chapter upon this subject together, the reader will probably think that it does not answer the expectations which the public have formed upon the author's powers as a reasoner. His political opponents will be apt to think, also, that he has done something less than justice to them, in the view which he has given of their principles. After laboring, in the way we have seen, to prove that our Constitution is not a compact, he informs us that "The cardinal conclusion for which this doctrine of a compact has been, with so much ingenuity and ability, forced into the language of the Constitution, (for the latter no where alludes to it,) is avowedly to establish that, in construing the Constitution, there is no common umpire; but that, each State, nay, each department of the government of each State, is the supreme judge for itself, of the powers and rights and duties arising under that instrument."

The author must excuse me&mdash;I mean no disrespect to him&mdash;if I express my unfeigned astonishment that he should have admitted this passage into a grave and deliberate work on the Constitution. He must, indeed, have been a most careless observer of passing events, and a still more careless reader of the publications of the last ten years, upon this very point, if he has found either in the one or the other, the slightest authority for the opinion which is here advanced. The most ultra of those who have contended for the rights of the States have asserted no such doctrine as he has imputed to them. Neither is it the necessary or legitimate consequence of any principle which they have avowed. I cannot impute to an author of his