Page:Works of John C. Calhoun, v1.djvu/166

 and partly aristocratic or popular; and vice versa. Monarchy is not more strongly distinguished from either, than a federal is from a national government. Indeed, these are even more adverse to each other; for the other forms may be blended in the constitution and the government; while, as has been shown, and as is indirectly admitted by the work referred to, the one of these so excludes the other, that it is impossible to blend them in the same constitution, and, of course, in the same government. I say, indirectly admitted, for it admits, that a federal government is one to which States are parties, in their distinct, independent, and sovereign character; and that — "the idea of a national government involves in it, not only an authority over individual citizens, but an indefinite supremacy over all persons and things, so far as they are objects of lawful government" — and, "that it is one, in which all local authorities are subordinate to the supreme, and may be controlled, directed, and abolished by it at pleasure." How, then, is it possible for institutions, admitted to be so utterly repugnant in their nature as to be directly destructive of each other, to be so blended as to form a government partly federal and partly national? What can be more contradictious? This, of itself, is sufficient to destroy the authority of the work on this point — as celebrated as it is — without showing, as might be done, that the admissions it makes throughout, are, in like manner, in direct contradiction to the conclusions, to which it comes.

But, strange as such a conclusion is, after such