ing parties covenant, one with another, to abstain
from the separate exercise of certain powers, which they agree to
intrust to the management and control of the union or general agency of
the parties associated. It is not a prohibition imposed upon them from
without, or from above, by any external or superior power, but is
self-imposed by their free consent. The case is strictly analogous to
that of individuals forming a mercantile or manufacturing copartnership,
who voluntarily agree to refrain, as individuals, from engaging in other
pursuits or speculations, from lending their individual credit, or from
the exercise of any other right of a citizen, which they may think
proper to subject to the consent, or intrust to the management of the
firm.

The prohibitory clauses of the Constitution referred to are not at all a
denial of the full sovereignty of the States, but are merely an
agreement among them to exercise certain powers of sovereignty in
concert, and not separately and apart.

There is one other provision of the Constitution, which is generally
adduced by the friends of centralism as antagonistic to State
sovereignty. This is found in the second clause of the sixth article, as
follows:

"This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which
shall be made in pursuance thereof, and all treaties made, or
which shall be made, under the authority of the United States,
shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every
State shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or
laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding."

This enunciation of a principle, which, even if it had not been
expressly declared, would have been a necessary deduction from the
acceptance of the Constitution itself, has been magnified and perverted
into a meaning and purpose entirely foreign to that which plain
interpretation is sufficient to discern. Mr. Motley thus dilates on the
subject:

"Could language be more imperial? Could the claim to State
'sovereignty' be more completely disposed of at a word? How can
that be sovereign, acknowledging no superior, supreme, which has
voluntarily accepted a supreme law from something which it
acknowledges as superior?"[74]

The mistake which Mr. Motley--like other writers of the same
school--makes is one which is disposed of by a very simple correction.
The States, which ordained and established the Constitution, _accepted_
n