the
Constitution which is susceptible of such a construction. No one of
the enumerated powers touches the subject or has even a remote analogy
to it. The powers conferred upon the United States have reference to
federal relations, or to the means of accomplishing or executing things
of federal relation. So also of the same character are the powers taken
away from the States by enumeration. In either case the powers granted
and the powers restricted were so granted or so restricted only where
it was requisite for the maintenance of peace and harmony between the
States or for the purpose of protecting their common interests and
defending their common sovereignty against aggression from abroad or
insurrection at home.

I shall not discuss at length the question of power sometimes claimed
for the General Government under the clause of the eighth section of the
Constitution, which gives Congress the power "to lay and collect taxes,
duties, imposts, and excises, to pay debts and provide for the common
defense and general welfare of the United States," because if it has not
already been settled upon sound reason and authority it never will be.
I take the received and just construction of that article, as if written
to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises _in order_ to pay
the debts and _in order_ to provide for the common defense and general
welfare. It is not a substantive general power to provide for the
welfare of the United States, but is a limitation on the grant of power
to raise money by taxes, duties, and imposts. If it were otherwise, all
the rest of the Constitution, consisting of carefully enumerated and
cautiously guarded grants of specific powers, would have been useless,
if not delusive. It would be impossible in that view to escape from the
conclusion that these were inserted only to mislead for the present,
and, instead of enlightening and defining the pathway of the future,
to involve its action in the mazes of doubtful construction. Such a
conclusion the character of the men who framed that sacred instrument
will never permit us to form. Indeed, to suppose it susceptible of any
other construction would be to consign all the rights of the States and
of the people of the States to the mere discretion of Congress, and thus
to clothe the Federal Government with authority to control the sovereign
States, by which they would have been dwarfed into provinces or
departments and all sovereignty vested