906 JOINT RESOLUTIONS.
Report of the
Committee. |
pose that the States, now awakened to a true sense
of their rights and the danger of consolidation,
will ever submit to such a bill as this? I tell you
nay.
Who is to be the judge in the last resort, of the
violation of the Constitution of the United States
by the enactment of a law ? Who is the final
arbiter, the General Government, or the States, in
their sovereignty ? Why, sir, to yield that point
is to yield up all the rights of the States to protect
their own citizens, and to consolidate this Govern-
ment into a miserable despotism. I tell you, sir,
whatever you may think of it, if this bill pass,
collisions will arise between the Federal and State
jurisdictions—conflicts more dangerous than all
the wordy wars which are got up in Congress—
conflicts in which the States will never yield; for
the more you undertake to load them with acts
like this, the greater will be their resistance.
At the session of the next Congress the same
Senator spoke as follows:
" But Southern gentlemen stand here and in
almost, all their speeches speak of the dissolution
of the Union as an element of every argument, as
though it were a peculiar condescension on their
part that they permitted the Union to stand at all.
If they do not feel interested in upholding this
Union, if it really trenches on their rights, if it
endangers their institutions to such an extent that
they do not feel secure under it, if their interests
are violently assailed by means of this Union, 1
am not one of those who expect that they will con-
tinue longer under it. I am not one of those who
would ask them to continue in such a Union. It
would be doing violence to the platform of the
party to which I belong. We have adopted the
old Declaration of Independence as the basis of
our political movement, which declares that any
people, when the government ceases to protect
their rights, when it ie so subverted from the true
purposes of government as to oppress them, have
a right to recur to fundamental principles, and if
need be to destroy the government under which
they live, and to erect on its ruins another more
conducive to their welfare. I hold that they have
this right. I will not blame any people for exer- |
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