r for common protection and
charged with a few specific duties, relating chiefly to our foreign
affairs, into a consolidated empire, depriving the States of their
reserved rights and the people of their just power and control in the
administration of their Government. In this manner the whole form and
character of the Government would be changed, not by an amendment of the
Constitution, but by resorting to an unwarrantable and unauthorized
construction of that instrument.

The indirect mode of levying the taxes by a duty on imports prevents
the mass of the people from readily perceiving the amount they pay, and
has enabled the few who are thus enriched, and who seek to wield the
political power of the country, to deceive and delude them. Were the
taxes collected by a direct levy upon the people, as is the case in the
States, this could not occur.

The whole system was resisted from its inception by many of our
ablest statesmen, some of whom doubted its constitutionality and its
expediency, while others believed it was in all its branches a flagrant
and dangerous infraction of the Constitution.

That a national bank, a protective tariff--levied not to raise the
revenue needed, but for protection merely--internal improvements, and
the distribution of the proceeds of the sale of the public lands are
measures without the warrant of the Constitution would, upon the
maturest consideration, seem to be clear. It is remarkable that no one
of these measures, involving such momentous consequences, is authorized
by any express grant of power in the Constitution. No one of them is
"incident to, as being necessary and proper for the execution of, the
specific powers" granted by the Constitution. The authority under which
it has been attempted to justify each of them is derived from inferences
and constructions of the Constitution which its letter and its whole
object and design do not warrant. Is it to be conceived that such
immense powers would have been left by the framers of the Constitution
to mere inferences and doubtful constructions? Had it been intended to
confer them on the Federal Government, it is but reasonable to conclude
that it would have been done by plain and unequivocal grants. This was
not done; but the whole structure of which the "American system"
consisted was reared on no other or better foundation than forced
implications and inferences of power, which its authors assumed might
be deduced by construction fr