decided, she is authorized to
resist their execution by her own sovereign power; and she declares that
she will resist it, though such resistance should shatter the Union into
atoms.

Mr. President, I do not intend to discuss the propriety of these laws at
large; but I will ask, How are they shown to be thus plainly and
palpably unconstitutional? Have they no countenance at all in the
Constitution itself? Are they quite new in the history of the
government? Are they a sudden and violent usurpation on the rights of
the States? Sir, what will the civilized world say, what will posterity
say, when they learn that similar laws have existed from the very
foundation of the government, that for thirty years the power was never
questioned, and that no State in the Union has more freely and
unequivocally admitted it than South Carolina herself?

To lay and collect duties and imposts is an _express power_ granted by
the Constitution to Congress. It is, also, an _exclusive power_; for the
Constitution as expressly prohibits all the States from exercising it
themselves. This express and exclusive power is unlimited in the terms
of the grant, but is attended with two specific restrictions: first,
that all duties and imposts shall be equal in all the States; second,
that no duties shall be laid on exports. The power, then, being granted,
and being attended with these two restrictions, and no more, who is to
impose a third restriction on the general words of the grant? If the
power to lay duties, as known among all other nations, and as known in
all our history, and as it was perfectly understood when the
Constitution was adopted, includes a right of discriminating while
exercising the power, and of laying some duties heavier and some
lighter, for the sake of encouraging our own domestic products, what
authority is there for giving to the words used in the Constitution a
new, narrow, and unusual meaning? All the limitations which the
Constitution intended, it has expressed; and what it has left
unrestricted is as much a part of its will as the restraints which it
has imposed.

But these laws, it is said, are unconstitutional on account of the
_motive_. How, Sir, can a law be examined on any such ground? How is the
motive to be ascertained? One house, or one member, may have one motive;
the other house, or another member, another. One motive may operate
to-day, and another to-morrow. Upon any such mode of reasoning as this,
one la