the principle of common humanity, common
virtue and common interest. It is the inter-
est of the individual against the interests of
society, without which it is impossible for
him to live.
The gentleman gravely says that the peo-
ple of the several States have parted with no
portion of their sovereignty, How is it pos-
sible that any gentleman can make such a
declaration as this, in the face of the Consti-
tution of the United States. Sovereignty
is supreme law and paramount authority, it
is the right of the Federal Government to
borrow money, regulate commerce and make
treaties, and exercise other powers . Can any
State regulate commerce? Can it enter into
any commercial treaty with another State.
Yet if a State were sovereign, it could do so,
You cannot move an inch upon the theory of
State sovereignty without coming into flat
contradiction with the Constitution of the
United States.
The true theory is this, that all powers
which have been expressly granted by the
people to the Federal Constitution are the
supreme law of the land. On the other hand
the General Government is prohibited from
exercising any privileges or acts of sover-
eignty, which it is declared in this instrument
that it is dangerous to the common weal that
they shall exercise. The sovereignty of the
Federal Government is a limited sovereignty ;
it does not conflict with the sovereignty of
the States. They are a duality and at the
same time a unit. They are different branches
of the same: thing. At the very line where
the sovereignty of the Federal Government
atops, the sovereignty of the individual States
takes it rise and goes on and completes the
entire whole. The Federal Government does
not pretend to be an absolute sovereignty •
but it is a partial sovereignty. In relation
to the purposes for which it was instituted,
so fair it is as absolute, as powerful and as
untrammelled by any State whims or State
prejudices or State rights, as the Government
of Great Britain. The National Government
so far us these powers go, is as strong and as
untrammelled as it is possible for a govern-
ment to be. Where it stops the States takes
up their sovereignty. The people of the State
then take up the sovereign power that resides
in them and distribute it among themselves
They legislate upon municipal affairs among
themselves. They control their county and
other local regulations; and they do what we
are here to-day to do. it is no conflict, and
there never can be a conflict rightly. There is
no necessity that there should be a conflict be-
tween the State sovereignty and the Federal
sovereignty.
The argument which is introduced with
such strong emphasis and such declaration
and such positiveness is this: Maryland be-
ing a sovereign before the revolution, was
sovereign as an individual State, and the State |
being individually sovereign, could not part
with that sovereignty. At the time of the
formation of the Federal Constitution, the
States or the colonies out of which States was
formed, was sovereign; and because they
were sovereign, it is held that they could not
lose that sovereignty by becoming a part of
any greater power, any greater confederacy
for the general good.
As well might gentlemen have said that the
individual citizens who originally came over
into Maryland and settled upon these shores
in St. Mary's county, because they were in-
dividual sovereigns, being possessed of all the
rights which men are supposed to possess in
a state of nature outside of society, could not
form a State. If individuals originally free
and independent, have the power to form com-
munities, cannot those committies form
larger communities? Cannot these unite and
form still larger, and so on, until, if it were
practicable and advisable, they should make
one consolidated government for this entire
globe? If it were advisable, they have the
power to make a government that would con-
trol the destinies of every race of men known
under the genus homo. No man can deny the
power, it comes from the very lowest; from
the individual up to the specific, and from the?
specific up to the general. Upon the assump-
tion, so confidently made, that because a State
is free and independent, it cannot get rid of
that sovereignty, or form a part of a higher
sovereignty, the man who puts himself out-
side of society, who goes like a hermit on
some mountain lop, and places himself be-
yond the control of his fellow men, could no
more forever become a member of a commu-
nity by any volition of his, or by his volition
get rid of his individual sovereignty. Who
ever heard such a doctrine ?
The States at the inception of this Federal
Government were free and independent sov-
ereign States, Nobody doubts that. That
is not the point of the argument. A militia
officer out in Michigan used to cut out men
from pumpkins—the pumpkins grew very
large there—and set them up in a row, and
then go to work with trenchant biaide and de-
molish them all, and takes great credit to
himself for having done so. Nobody disputes,
and it was not worth while to argue, that the
States were sovereign at the time of the for-
mation of the Federal Government. But we
claim that being sovereign, they had the
power to part with a portion of that sover-
eignty, and to lodge it, by the Constitution,
in the legislative, executive, and judicial de-
partments of the General Government; and
they did it, and that is what constituted the
sovereignty of the Federal Government.
The gentleman says it was never designed
to confer upon the Supreme Court of the United
States the power to sit in judgment upon the
powers of the State. What was the Supreme
Court organized for? The Constitution says |
