e Union is a means, not an end. By requiring greater sacrifices
of domestic power, the end is sacrificed to the means. Suppose the
surrender of all, or nearly all, the domestic powers of legislation were
required; the means would there have swallowed up the end.

The argument that the compact may be enforced, shows that the Federal
predicament changed. The power of the Union not only acts on persons or
citizens, but on the faculty of the government, and restrains it in a
way which the Constitution nowhere authorizes. This new obligation takes
away a right which is expressly "reserved to the people or the States,"
since it is nowhere granted to the government of the Union. You cannot
do indirectly what you cannot do directly. It is said that this Union
is competent to make compacts. Who doubts it? But can you make this
compact? I insist that you cannot make it, because it is repugnant to
the thing to be done.

The effect of such a compact would be to produce that inequality in the
Union, to which the Constitution, in all its provisions, is adverse.
Everything in it looks to equality among the members of the Union. Under
it you cannot produce inequality. Nor can you get before-hand of the
Constitution, and do it by anticipation. Wait until a State is in the
Union, and you cannot do it; yet it is only upon the State in the Union
that what you do begins to act.

But it seems that, although the proposed restrictions may not be
justified by the clause of the Constitution which gives power to admit
new States into the Union, separately considered, there are other parts
of the Constitution which, combined with that clause, will warrant it.
And first, we are informed that there is a clause in this instrument
which declares that Congress shall guarantee to every State a republican
form of government; that slavery and such a form of government are
incompatible; and, finally, as a conclusion from these premises, that
Congress not only have a right, but are bound to exclude slavery from a
new State. Here again, sir, there is an edifying inconsistency between
the argument and the measure which it professes to vindicate. By the
argument it is maintained that Missouri cannot have a republican form of
government, and at the same time tolerate negro slavery. By the measure
it is admitted that Missouri may tolerate slavery, as to persons already
in bondage there, and be nevertheless fit to be received into the Union.
What sort of consti