Page:Works of John C. Calhoun, v1.djvu/287

 their legislatures, and all their executive and judicial officers — shall be bound, by oath or affirmation, to support the constitution — and that the decision of the highest tribunal of the judicial power is final, as between the parties to a case or controversy — the danger of any serious derangement or disorder from the effects of the negative on the parts of the separate governments of the several States, must appear, not only much less than that from the Roman tribunate, but very inconsiderable. The danger is, indeed, the other way — that the disposition on the part of the governments of the several States, to acquiesce in the encroachments of the government of the United States, will prove stronger than the disposition to resist; and the negative, compared with the positive power, will be found to be too feeble to preserve the equilibrium between them. But if it should prove otherwise — and if, in consequence, any serious derangement of the system should ensue, there will be found, in the earliest and highest division of power, which I shall next proceed to consider, ample and safe means of correcting them.

I refer to that resulting from, and inseparably connected with the primitive territorial division of the country itself — coeval with its settlement into separate and distinct communities; and which, though dependent at the first on the parent country, became, by a successful resistance to its encroachments on their chartered rights, independent and sovereign States. In them severally — or to express it more precisely, in the people composing them, regarded