Page:Nullification Controversy in South Carolina.djvu/89

 the other would come confusion, anarchy, and civil war, with a horrible train of calamities. In construing the federal Constitution equal care should be observed to avoid both these issues. An unlimited latitudinarian construction would give rise to the one, and a rigid literal construction, by disarming the national government of its ceded power, would cause the other.

The federal judiciary, to the Union men, was the great arbiter between the national and state governments, and they believed that this tremendous power of settling disputes between these governments could not have been lodged anywhere else with so much propriety. To say that each state had the right, either in convention or in its legislature, to determine on the constitutionality of the proceedings of the general government, would be to place the country in that desperate extremity in which it was under the Articles of Confederation. The power to settle disputes between the general and state governments had to be vested somewhere; it was the intention of the Federal Convention to make the judiciary the interpreter and guardian protector of the Constitution; this intention was clearly and indisputably expressed in the Constitution itself; this