ncontrolled, irresistible, and despotic power; nor is
such a power absolutely essential to sovereignty. The direct converse
of the proposition is true. Uncontrollable power exists in no
government upon earth. The sternest despotisms, in every region and
every age of the world, _are and have been_ under perpetual control;
compelled, as Burke expresses it, to truckle and huckster. Unlimited
power belongs not to the nature of man, and rotten will be the
foundation of every government leaning upon such a maxim for its
support. Least of all can it be predicated of any government professing
to be founded upon an original compact. The pretence of an absolute,
irresistible, despotic power, existing in every government _somewhere_,
is incompatible with the first principle of natural right."

This proposition Mr. Adams proceeds fully to illustrate, and thus to
apply: "This political sophism of identity between _sovereign_ and
_despotic_ power has led, and continues to lead, into many vagaries,
some of the statists of this our happy but disputatious Union. It
seizes upon the brain of a heated politician, sometimes in one state,
sometimes in another, and its natural offspring is the doctrine of
nullification; that is, the _sovereign_ power of any one state of the
confederacy to nullify any act of the whole twenty-four states which
the _sovereign_ state shall please to consider as unconstitutional.
Stripped of the sophistical argumentation in which this doctrine has
been habited, its naked nature is an effort to organize insurrection
against the laws of the United States; to interpose the arm of state
sovereignty between rebellion and the halter, and to rescue the traitor
from the gibbet. Although conducted under the auspices of state
sovereignty, it would not the less be levying war against the Union;
but, as a state cannot be punished for treason, nullification cases
herself in the complete steel of sovereign power." "The citizen of the
nullifying state becomes a traitor to his country by obedience to the
law of his state,--a traitor to his state by obedience to the law of
his country. The scaffold and the battle-field stream alternately with
the blood of their victims. The event of a conflict in arms between the
Union and one of its members, whether terminating in victory or defeat,
would be but an alternative of calamity to all."

Mr. Adams took his seat in the House of Representatives in December,
1831, and immediately announc