Music, New
York, July 4, 1861.]

[Footnote 50: Ibid.]

[Footnote 51: "Federalist," No. xxxix.]

CHAPTER VII.

Verbal Cavils and Criticisms.--"Compact," "Confederacy,"
"Accession," etc.--The "New Vocabulary."--The Federal
Constitution a Compact, and the States acceded to it.--Evidence
of the Constitution itself and of Contemporary Records.

I have habitually spoken of the Federal Constitution as a compact, and
of the parties to it as sovereign States. These terms should not, and in
earlier times would not, have required explanation or vindication. But
they have been called in question by the modern school of consolidation.
These gentlemen admit that the Government under the Articles of
Confederation was a compact. Mr. Webster, in his rejoinder to Mr. Hayne,
on the 27th of January, 1830, said:

"When the gentleman says the Constitution is a compact between
the States, he uses language exactly applicable to the old
Confederation. He speaks as if he were in Congress before 1789.
He describes fully that old state of things then existing. The
Confederation was, in strictness, a compact; the States, as
States, were parties to it. We had no other General Government.
But that was found insufficient and inadequate to the public
exigencies. The people were not satisfied with it, and undertook
to establish a better. They undertook to form a General
Government, which should stand on a new basis--not a
confederacy, not a league, not a compact between States, but a
Constitution."[52]

Again, in his discussion with Mr. Calhoun, three years afterward, he
vehemently reiterates the same denial. Of the Constitution, he says:
"Does it call itself a compact? Certainly not. It uses the word
'compact' but once, and that when it declares that the States shall
enter into no compact.[53] Does it call itself a league, a confederacy,
a subsisting treaty between the States? Certainly not. There is not a
particle of such language in all its pages."[54]

The artist, who wrote under his picture the legend "This is a horse,"
made effectual provision against any such cavil as that preferred by Mr.
Webster and his followers, that the Constitution is not a compact,
because it is not "so nominated in the bond." As well as I can
recollect, there is no passage in the "Iliad" or the "AEneid" in which
either of those great works "calls itself," or is called by its author,
an ep