sion. They argued that it was a
constitutional right; that they could live within the Constitution and
beyond it,--inside the house and outside it at one and the same time. They
contended that, the Constitution being a compact between the States, the
Federal government was the creation of the States; yet, in the same breath,
they declared that the general government was a party to the contract from
which it had itself emanated, in order to get rid of the difficulty of
proving that, while the single dissenting State could decide against the
validity of a law, the twenty or more other States, also parties to the
contract, had no right to deliver an opposite judgment which should be
binding as the opinion of the majority of the court. There was nothing very
ingenious or very profound in the argument by which Mr. Webster
demonstrated the absurdity of the doctrine which attempted to make
nullification a peaceable constitutional privilege, when it could be in
practice nothing else than revolution. But the manner in which he put the
argument was magnificent and final. As he himself said, in this very speech
of Samuel Dexter, "his statement was argument, his inference
demonstration."

The weak places in his armor were historical in their nature. It was
probably necessary, at all events Mr. Webster felt it to be so, to argue
that the Constitution at the outset was not a compact between the States,
but a national instrument, and to distinguish the cases of Virginia and
Kentucky in 1799 and of New England in 1814, from that of South Carolina in
1830. The former point he touched upon lightly, the latter he discussed
ably, eloquently, ingeniously, and at length. Unfortunately the facts were
against him in both instances. When the Constitution was adopted by the
votes of States at Philadelphia, and accepted by the votes of States in
popular conventions, it is safe to say that there was not a man in the
country from Washington and Hamilton on the one side, to George Clinton and
George Mason on the other, who regarded the new system as anything but an
experiment entered upon by the States and from which each and every State
had the right peaceably to withdraw, a right which was very likely to be
exercised. When the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions appeared they were
not opposed on constitutional grounds, but on those of expediency and of
hostility to the revolution which they were considered to embody. Hamilton,
and no one knew the Con