and the theory of State subjugation, of provincial dependencies, is a pure afterthought to justify arbitrary and ungranted authority. It is indisputable that by far the greater part of the topics of legislation, the whole vast range of rights of person and property—where the administration of law and justice comes closest home to the daily life of the people—are exclusively or chiefly within the power of the States. The number of topics of legislation which lie outside the pale of national legislation greatly exceeds the number to which the power of State legislation does not extend. (Federalist, No. 14; Mich. Lect., 244; 1 Calhoun, 197, 204, 214-15.) If the Union be indissoluble, with equal or greater propriety we may affirm that the States are equal and indestructible.
When the adoption of the Constitution was under discussion before the State conventions, with an uncertain result, its enemies were alarmed on account of the magnitude of powers conferred on the general government and its friends were fearful because of alleged feebleness in comparison with extent of reserved powers; but neither party contended that an increase or diminution of power could constitutionally be made by implication and inference so as to equip the central government with all the means it derived in the warfare with antagonists. The authors of The Federalist—the essays written to secure the acceptance of the Constitution—insisted that the apprehended inequality did not exist, and that should it be developed, the States would be able to control. Hamilton wrote: ‘The general government can have no temptation to absorb the local authorities left with the States. * * * It is, therefore, improbable that there should exist a disposition in the Federal councils to usurp the powers with which commerce, finance, negotiation and war are connected. Should wantonness, lust of domination, beget such a disposition, the sense of the people of the several States would control the indulgence of so extravagant an appetite.’ This redundant exposition of the doctrine that there can be no tribunal above the authority of the States and that in them reside the ultimate decision, has been made because there is such a painful misunderstanding of the relation the Federal government sustains to the States, and of the comparative authority, power and value of the Union and of the States.
The forebodings of those who dreaded an undue enlargement of the powers of the central government—the increase of centripetal tendencies to the weakening of the centrifugal—have been more than realized. Instead of a rivalry between the general government and the States, between the delegated and the reserved powers, the antagonism has proved unreal and fallacious, and the strong trend has been and is to centralization, justifying the prediction of Jefferson that ‘when all government, domestic and foreign, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the center of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another, and will become as venial and oppressive as the government from which we separated.’ By an irresistible tendency the stronger has absorbed the weaker and is concentrating in itself unlimited and uncontrollable power. This usurpation has been carried so far that nothing short of an absolute negative on the part of the States can protect against the encroachments of a growingly centralized government. For a few years and naturally, States were superior in dignity, and two citizens of South Carolina declined positions on the Supreme court, one the chief-justiceship. The enlargement of territory, the multiplication of States, the glory resulting from successful wars, the enormous prosperity caused by varied climate and products, free interstate commerce, religious liberty, the stimulus of free institutions, extensive landed proprietorship, the immense Federal and subsidizing expenditures, government partnership in business, the building up of favored classes and interests by protective tariffs and bounties and discriminating fiscal policy, the vast number of Federal offices constituting executive patronage and conferred not as a trust for the public good, but as spoils of office and rewards for partisans, a huge pension system, destroying local patriotism of recipients and corrupting states—have magnified the government at Washington and given from exuberance of strength a resistless impulse, adverse to its federal and favorable to a consolidated character. This revolutionary change has been attended by the grossest inequality, because a majority has centered in one section, giving it absolute control on all questions which coincide with its views and interests. As the government has been centralized, nationalized, lost its original character as a constitutional federal republic, its power has grown by what it has fed upon and its patronage has become more tempting and wide spread. Proportionate with power and patronage, and increasing with their increase, will be the desire to possess the control over them, for the purpose of individual or sectional aggrandizement; and the stronger this desire, the less will be the regard for principles and the Constitution, and the greater the tendency, accompanied by increase of ability, to unite for sectional domination. (1 Calhoun, 241, 371.) The tariff system, framed in the interests and at the dictation of classes and persons that contribute liberally in elections; the taxation practically of agricultural exports, grown preponderantly in one section; the partial, inequitable appropriations for rivers, harbors, public buildings, the concentration of the financial operations of the government in one quarter of the Union; the theories of the latitudinous interpretation of the Constitution which dominated parties and dictated political and legislative action at the North, investing Congress with the right to determine what objects belong to the general welfare; have been most potential in enriching one section to the prejudice of the other and in enlarging the power, prestige and influence of the Union. The power of Congress to levy duties on imports for specific purposes has been enlarged into an unlimited authority to protect domestic manufactures against foreign competition. The effect of this has been ‘to impose the main burden of taxation upon the Southern people, who were consumers and not manufacturers, not only by the enhanced price of imports, but indirectly by the consequent depreciation of the value of exports, which were chiefly the products of the Southern States.’ The increase of price was not always paid into the public treasury, but accrued somewhat to the benefit of the manufacturer. What revenues went into the treasury were disbursed most unequally, and the sectional discrimination, enriching one portion to the injury and inequality of the other, tended to direct immigration to the North and to increase the functions and influence of the Federal government. The majority, doing the injustice, claim to be the sole judges of the rightness of their action and whether or not the power is lodged in their hands. The minority have no rights which the majority are bound to respect, or if they have, there are no means of asserting and vindicating them. The majority, which are sectional, possess the government, measure its powers and wield them without responsibility. Enriched by their own acts, becoming proud, insolent, greedy of power and gain, inflamed by cupidity, avarice, monopoly, they arrogate and usurp; and, with each succeeding day, what was very questionable becomes by force of unresisted precedent a principle, and self-conceit transmutes exercise of power into piety, and the judgment of parties and the interest of classes into a higher law, into the will of God. We find in England and other countries an aristocracy, the classes in the enjoyment of pensions, tithes, monopolies, vested rights, exclusive privileges until, with blunted sensibilities and beclouded intellects, they delude themselves into acquiescence in, and support of, such inequalities and wrongs. So in the United States, under powers granted in the Constitution, such as levying duties and taxes, regulating commerce, war, appropriating money, disposing of territory and other property, admitting new States, the government during the Confederate war incorporated banks, made fiat money or promises to pay a legal tender, constructed roads, granted bounties and monopolies, gave away the property of the people, prescribed State constitutions, emancipated slaves, fixed terms and conditions of suffrage, dictated manner of appointing and electing senators, assumed control over railways and industries and absorbed and exercised a sovereign power over interstate commerce, capital, labor, currency and property. We have seen an alliance between Congress and eleemosynarians, senators taking care of their private affairs in revenue bills, and manufacturers before sub-committees of ways and means and of finance dictating the subjects to be taxed and the amount of duties to be levied.
One wonders how these revolutions and iniquities have been accomplished. Governor Morris wrote to Timothy Pickering that ‘the legislative lion will not be entangled in the meshes of a logical net. The legislature will always make the power which it wishes to exercise.’ One of the ablest expounders of the Constitution deplores ‘the science of verbality,’ the artifice of so verbalizing as to assail and destroy the plainest provisions. The instrumentality of inference has sapped and mined our political system. Acuteness of misinterpretation and construction has accomplished what the framers of the Constitution exerted all their