ay squeeze down a new-born sovereign State to the size of a
pigmy, and then taking it between finger and thumb, stick it into some
niche of the Union, and still continue by way of mockery to call it a
State in the sense of the Constitution. You may waste it to a shadow,
and then introduce it into the society of flesh and blood an object of
scorn and derision. You may sweat and reduce it to a thing of skin and
bone, and then place the ominous skeleton beside the ruddy and healthful
members of the Union, that it may have leisure to mourn the lamentable
difference between itself and its companions, to brood over its
disastrous promotion, and to seek in justifiable discontent an
opportunity for separation, and insurrection, and rebellion. What may
you not do by dexterity and perseverance with this terrific power? You
may give to a new State, in the form of terms which it cannot
refuse, (as I shall show you hereafter,) a statute book of a
thousand volumes--providing not for ordinary cases only, but even for
possibilities; you may lay the yoke, no matter whether light or heavy,
upon the necks of the latest posterity; you may send this searching
power into every hamlet for centuries to come, by laws enacted in the
spirit of prophecy, and regulating all those dear relations of domestic
concern which belong to local legislation, and which even local
legislation touches with a delicate and sparing hand. This is the first
inroad. But will it be the last? This provision is but a pioneer for
others of a more desolating aspect. It is that fatal bridge of which
Milton speaks, and when once firmly built, what shall hinder you to pass
it when you please for the purpose of plundering power after power at
the expense of new States, as you will still continue to call them, and
raising up prospective codes irrevocable and immortal, which shall leave
to those States the empty shadows of domestic sovereignty, and convert
them into petty pageants, in themselves contemptible, but rendered
infinitely more so by the contrast of their humble faculties with the
proud and admitted pretensions of those who having doomed them to
the inferiority of vassals, have condescended to take them into their
society and under their protection?

"New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union." It is
objected that the word "may" imports power, not obligation--a right to
decide--a discretion to grant or refuse.

To this it might be answered that power