is duty on many occasions. But
let it be conceded that it is discretionary. What consequence follows?
A power to refuse, in a case like this, does not necessarily involve a
power to exact terms. You must look to the result which is the declared
object of the power. Whether you will arrive at it, or not, may depend
on your will; but you cannot compromise with the result intended and
professed.

What then is the professed result? To admit a State into this Union.

What is that Union? A confederation of States equal in
sovereignty--capable of everything which the Constitution does not
forbid, or authorize Congress to forbid. It is an equal union, between
parties equally sovereign. They were sovereign independently of the
Union. The object of the Union was common protection for the exercise
of already existing sovereignty. The parties gave up a portion of that
sovereignty to insure the remainder. As far as they gave it up by the
common compact they have ceased to be sovereign. The Union provides the
means of defending the residue; and it is into that Union that a new
State is to come. By acceding to it, the new State is placed on the same
footing with the original States. It accedes for the same purpose,
i.e., protection for their unsurrendered sovereignty. If it comes in shorn
of its beams--crippled and disparaged beyond the original States, it is
not into the original Union that it comes. For it is a different sort
of Union. The first was Union _inter pares_. This is a Union between
"_disparates_"--between giants and a dwarf--between power and
feebleness--between full proportioned sovereignties and a miserable
image of power--a thing which that very Union has shrunk and shrivelled
from its just size, instead of preserving it in its true dimensions.

It is into this Union, i. e., the Union of the Federal Constitution,
that you are to admit, or refuse to admit. You can admit into no other.
You cannot make the Union, as to the new State, what it is not as to the
old; for then it is not this Union that you open for the entrance of a
new party. If you make it enter into a new and additional compact, is it
any longer the same Union?

We are told that admitting a State into the Union is a compact. Yes,
but what sort of a compact? A compact that it shall be a member of the
Union, as the Constitution has made it. You cannot new fashion it. You
may make a compact to admit, but when admitted the original compact
prevails. The U