ed to the aggregation of
individuals into one community? Nor is the other point less clear--that
the sovereignty is in the several States, and that our system is a union
of twenty-four sovereign powers, under a constitutional compact, and not
of a divided sovereignty between the States severally and the United
States? In spite of all that has been said, I maintain that sovereignty
is in its nature indivisible. It is the supreme power in a State, and we
might just as well speak of half a square, or half of a triangle, as of
half a sovereignty. It is a gross error to confound the exercise of
sovereign powers with sovereignty itself, or the delegation of such
powers with the surrender of them. A sovereign may delegate his powers
to be exercised by as many agents as he may think proper, under such
conditions and with such limitations as he may impose; but to surrender
any portion of his sovereignty to another is to annihilate the whole.
The Senator from Delaware (Mr. Clayton) calls this metaphysical
reasoning, which he says he cannot comprehend. If by metaphysics he
means that scholastic refinement which makes distinctions without
difference, no one can hold it in more utter contempt than I do; but if,
on the contrary, he means the power of analysis and combination--that
power which reduces the most complex idea into its elements, which
traces causes to their first principle, and, by the power of
generalization and combination, unites the whole in one harmonious
system--then, so far from deserving contempt, it is the highest
attribute of the human mind. It is the power which raises man above the
brute--which distinguishes his faculties from mere sagacity, which he
holds in common with inferior animals. It is this power which has raised
the astronomer from being a mere gazer at the stars to the high
intellectual eminence of a Newton or a Laplace, and astronomy itself
from a mere observation of insulated facts into that noble science which
displays to our admiration the system of the universe. And shall this
high power of the mind, which has effected such wonders when directed to
the laws which control the material world, be forever prohibited, under
a senseless cry of metaphysics, from being applied to the high purposes
of political science and legislation? I hold them to be subject to laws
as fixed as matter itself, and to be as fit a subject for the
application of the highest intellectual power. Denunciation may, indeed
fal