Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 9.djvu/58

 THE WORLD'S FAMOUS ORATIONS justice." The opinion referred to, therefore, is in defiance of the plainest provisions of the Constitution. In Carolina, the tariff is a palpable, deliberate usurpation; Carolina, therefore, may nullify it, and refuse to pay the duties. In Pennsylvania it is both clearly constitutional and highly ex- pedient; and there the duties are to be paid. And yet we live under a government of uniform laws, and under a Constitution, too, which con- tains an express provision, as it happens, that all duties shall be equal in all the States. Does not this approach absurdity? If there be no power to settle such questions, independent of either of the States, is not the whole Union a rope of sand ? Are we not thrown back ^gain, precisely upon the old Confedera- tion? ] It is too plain to be argued. Four-and-twenty interpreters of constitutional law, each with a power to decide for itself, and none with authority to bind anybody else, and this con- stitutional law the only bond of their union! What is such a state of things but a mere con- nection during pleasure, or, to use the phrase- ology of the times, during feeling? And that feeling, too, not the feeling of the people who established the Constitution, but the feeling of the State governments. Resolutions, sir, have been recently passed by the Legislature of South Carolina. I need not refer to them; they go no farther than the 48