Page:Works of John C. Calhoun, v1.djvu/206

 to restrictions — and the power that passes acts to carry into execution, the powers thus delegated to government. The one, emanating from the people, as forming a sovereign community, creates the government — the other, as a representative appointed to execute its powers, enacts laws to regulate and control the conduct of the people, regarded as individuals. This division between the two powers — thus necessarily incident to the separation from the parent country — constitutes an element in our political system as essential to its formation, as the great and primary territorial division of independent and sovereign States. Between them, it was our good fortune never to have been left, for a moment, in doubt, as to where the sovereign authority was to be found; or how, and by whom it should be exercised: and, hence, the facility, the promptitude and safety, with which we passed from one state to the other, as far as internal causes were concerned. Our only difficulty and danger lay in the effort to resist the immense power of the parent country.

The governments of the several States were thus rightfully and regularly constituted. They, in the course of a few years, by entering into articles of confederation and perpetual union, established and made more perfect the union which had been informally constituted, in consequence of the exigencies growing out of the contest with a powerful enemy. But experience soon proved that the confederacy was wholly inadequate to effect the objects for which it was formed. It was then, and not until then, that the causes which had their origin in our