or the delegation of
important powers and functions of government to a common agent, an
authority above that of the State Legislatures was necessary. Mr.
Madison, in the "Federalist,"[33] says: "It has been heretofore noted
among the defects of the Confederation, that in many of the States it
had received no higher sanction than a mere legislative ratification."
This objection would of course have applied with greater force to the
proposed Constitution, which provided for additional grants of power
from the States, and the conferring of larger and more varied powers
upon a General Government, which was to act upon individuals instead of
States, if the question of its confirmation had been submitted merely to
the several State Legislatures. Hence the obvious propriety of referring
it to the respective _people_ of the States in their sovereign capacity,
as provided in the final article of the Constitution.

In this article provision was deliberately made for the _secession_ (if
necessary) of a part of the States from a union which, when formed, had
been declared "perpetual," and its terms and articles to be "inviolably
observed by every State."

Opposition was made to the provision on this very ground--that it was
virtually a dissolution of the Union, and that it would furnish a
precedent for future secessions. Mr. Gerry, a distinguished member from
Massachusetts--afterward Vice-President of the United States--said, "If
nine out of thirteen (States) can dissolve the compact, six out of nine
will be just as able to dissolve the future one hereafter."

Mr. Madison, who was one of the leading members of the Convention,
advocating afterward, in the "Federalist," the adoption of the new
Constitution, asks the question, "On what principle the Confederation,
which stands in the solemn form of a compact among the States, can be
superseded without the unanimous consent of the parties to it?" He
answers this question "by recurring to the absolute necessity of the
case; to the great principle of self-preservation; to the transcendent
law of nature and of nature's God, which declares that the safety and
happiness of society are the objects at which all political institutions
aim, and to which all such institutions must be sacrificed." He
proceeds, however, to give other grounds of justification:

"It is an established doctrine on the subject of treaties, that
all the articles are mutually conditions of each other; that a