ges and jurors to
swear that they will disregard their provisions; and even makes it penal
in a suitor to attempt relief by appeal. It further declares that it
shall not be lawful for the authorities of the United States, or of that
State, to enforce the payment of duties imposed by the revenue laws
within its limits.

Here is a law of the United States, not even pretended to be
unconstitutional, repealed by the authority of a small majority of the
voters of a single State. Here is a provision of the Constitution which
is solemnly abrogated by the same authority.

On such expositions and reasonings, the ordinance grounds not only an
assertion of the right to annul the laws of which it complains, but to
enforce it by a threat of seceding from the Union, if any attempt is
made to execute them.

This right to secede is deduced from the nature of the Constitution,
which they say is a compact between sovereign States, who have preserved
their whole sovereignty, and therefore are subject to no superior; that
because they made the compact, they can break it when in their opinion
it has been departed from by the other States. Fallacious as this course
of reasoning is, it enlists State pride, and finds advocates in the
honest prejudices of those who have not studied the nature of our
government sufficiently to see the radical error on which it rests.

The people of the United States formed the Constitution, acting through
the State legislatures, in making the compact, to meet and discuss its
provisions, and acting in separate conventions when they ratified those
provisions; but the term used in its construction show it to be a
government in which the people of all the States collectively are
represented. We are ONE PEOPLE in the choice of the President and
Vice-President. Here the States have no other agency than to direct the
mode in which the votes shall be given. The candidates having the
majority of all the votes are chosen. The electors of a majority of
States may have given their votes for one candidate, and yet another may
be chosen. The people then, and not the States, are represented in the
executive branch.

In the House of Representatives there is this difference, that the
people of one State do not, as in the case of President and
Vice-President, all vote for all the members, each State electing only
its own representatives. But this creates no material distinction. When
chosen, they are all representatives of