in an absolute consolidated
central power, against which the spirit of liberty has so often and
in so many countries struggled in vain. In my judgment you can not by
tributes to humanity make any adequate compensation for the wrong you
would inflict by removing the sources of power and political action from
those who are to be thereby affected. If the time shall ever arrive
when, for an object appealing, however strongly, to our sympathies,
the dignity of the States shall bow to the dictation of Congress by
conforming their legislation thereto, when the power and majesty and
honor of those who created shall become subordinate to the thing of
their creation, I but feebly utter my apprehensions when I express
my firm conviction that we shall see "the beginning of the end."

Fortunately, we are not left in doubt as to the purpose of the
Constitution any more than as to its express language, for although the
history of its formation, as recorded in the Madison Papers, shows that
the Federal Government in its present form emerged from the conflict of
opposing influences which have continued to divide statesmen from that
day to this, yet the rule of clearly defined powers and of strict
construction presided over the actual conclusion and subsequent adoption
of the Constitution. President Madison, in the Federalist, says:

The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution are few and defined.
Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and
indefinite. ... Its [the General Government's] jurisdiction extends to
certain enumerated objects only, and leaves to the several States a
residuary and inviolable sovereignty over all other objects.

In the same spirit President Jefferson invokes "the support of
the State governments in all their rights as the most competent
administrations for our domestic concerns and the surest bulwarks
against anti-republican tendencies;" and President Jackson said that our
true strength and wisdom are not promoted by invasions of the rights and
powers of the several States, but that, on the contrary, they consist
"not in binding the States more closely to the center, but in leaving
each more unobstructed in its proper orbit."

The framers of the Constitution, in refusing to confer on the Federal
Government any jurisdiction over these purely local objects, in my
judgment manifested a wise forecast and broad comprehension of the true
interests of these objects themsel