aused,
more than any thing else, by these very proceedings of South Carolina?
Sir, all Europe is, at this moment, beholding us, and looking for the
issue of this controversy; those who hate free institutions, with
malignant hope; those who love them, with deep anxiety and shivering
fear.

The cause, then, Sir, the cause! Let the world know the cause which has
thus induced one State of the Union to bid defiance to the power of the
whole, and openly to talk of secession. Sir, the world will scarcely
believe that this whole controversy, and all the desperate measures
which its support requires, have no other foundation than a difference
of opinion upon a provision of the Constitution, between a majority of
the people of South Carolina, on one side, and a vast majority of the
whole people of the United States, on the other. It will not credit the
fact, it will not admit the possibility, that, in an enlightened age, in
a free, popular republic, under a constitution where the people govern,
as they must always govern under such systems, by majorities, at a time
of unprecedented prosperity, without practical oppression, without evils
such as may not only be pretended, but felt and experienced,--evils not
slight or temporary, but deep, permanent, and intolerable,--a single
State should rush into conflict with all the rest, attempt to put down
the power of the Union by her own laws, and to support those laws by her
military power, and thus break up and destroy the world's last hope. And
well the world may be incredulous. We, who see and hear it, can
ourselves hardly yet believe it. Even after all that had preceded it,
this ordinance struck the country with amazement. It was incredible and
inconceivable that South Carolina should plunge headlong into resistance
to the laws on a matter of opinion, and on a question in which the
preponderance of opinion, both of the present day and of all past time,
was so overwhelmingly against her. The ordinance declares that Congress
has exceeded its just power by laying duties on imports, intended for
the protection of manufactures. This is the opinion of South Carolina;
and on the strength of that opinion she nullifies the laws. Yet has the
rest of the country no right to its opinion also? Is one State to sit
sole arbitress? She maintains that those laws are plain, deliberate, and
palpable violations of the Constitution; that she has a sovereign right
to decide this matter; and that, having so