nsylvania negative. South Carolina, to show the strength
and unity of her opinion, brings her assembly to a unanimity, within
seven voices; Pennsylvania, not to be outdone in this respect any more
than in others, reduces her dissentient fraction to a single vote. Now,
Sir, again, I ask the gentleman, What is to be done? Are these States
both right? Is he bound to consider them both right? If not, which is in
the wrong? or rather, which has the best right to decide? And if he, and
if I, are not to know what the Constitution means, and what it is, till
those two State legislatures, and the twenty-two others, shall agree in
its construction, what have we sworn to, when we have sworn to maintain
it? I was forcibly struck, Sir, with one reflection, as the gentleman
went on in his speech. He quoted Mr. Madison's resolutions, to prove
that a State may interfere, in a case of deliberate, palpable, and
dangerous exercise of a power not granted. The honorable member supposes
the tariff law to be such an exercise of power; and that consequently a
case has arisen in which the State may, if it see fit, interfere by its
own law. Now it so happens, nevertheless, that Mr. Madison deems this
same tariff law quite constitutional. Instead of a clear and palpable
violation, it is, in his judgment, no violation at all. So that, while
they use his authority for a hypothetical case, they reject it in the
very case before them. All this, Sir, shows the inherent futility, I had
almost used a stronger word, of conceding this power of interference to
the State, and then attempting to secure it from abuse by imposing
qualifications of which the States themselves are to judge. One of two
things is true; either the laws of the Union are beyond the discretion
and beyond the control of the States; or else we have no constitution of
general government, and are thrust back again to the days of the
Confederation.

Let me here say, Sir, that if the gentleman's doctrine had been received
and acted upon in New England, in the times of the embargo and
non-intercourse, we should probably not now have been here. The
government would very likely have gone to pieces, and crumbled into
dust. No stronger case can ever arise than existed under those laws; no
States can ever entertain a clearer conviction than the New England
States then entertained; and if they had been under the influence of
that heresy of opinion, as I must call it, which the honorable member
esp