tax power, for the sole purpose of revenue—a power in its nature essentially different from that of imposing protective or prohibitory duties. The two are incompatible; for the prohibitory system must end in destroying the revenue from imports. It has been said that the system is a violation of the spirit, and not of the letter, of the Constitution. The distinction is not material. The Constitution may be as grossly violated by acting against its meaning, as against its letter. The Constitution grants to Congress the power of imposing a duty on imports for revenue, which power is abused by being converted into an instrument for rearing up the industry of one section of the country on the ruins of another. The violation, then, consists in using a power, granted for one object, to advance another, and that by a sacrifice of the original object. It is, in a word, a violation of perversion, the most dangerous of all, because the most insidious, and difficult to resist. Such is the reasoning emanating from high legislative authority."—Story.
MR. CALHOUN'S REPORT
on
THE CIRCULATING, THROUGH THE MAILS, OF INFLAMMATORY APPEALS.
Senate, February 4, 1836.
The message recommends that Congress should pass a law to punish the transmission, through the mail, of incendiary publications intended to instigate the slaves to insurrection. It of course assumes for Congress a right to determine what papers are incendiary and intended to excite insurrection. The question, then, is, Has Congress such a right?—a question of vital importance to the slaveholding states.
After examining this question with due deliberation, in all its bearings, the committee are of opinion, not only that Congress has not the right, but to admit it would be fatal to those states. Nothing is more clear than that the admission of the right, on the part of Congress, to determine what papers are incendiary, and, as such, to prohibit their circulation through the mail, necessarily involves the right to determine what are not incendiary, and to enforce their circulation. Nor is it less certain that to admit such a right would be virtually to clothe Congress with the power to abolish slavery, by giving it the means of breaking down all the barriers which the slaveholding states have erected for the protection of their lives and property. It would give Congress, without regard to the prohibition laws of the slates, the authority to open the gates to the flood of incendiary publications which are ready to break into those states, and to punish all who dare resist as criminals. Fortunately, Congress has no such right. The internal peace and security of the states are under the protection of the states themselves, to the entire exclusion of all authority and control on the part of Congress. It belongs to them, and not to Congress, to determine what is, or is not, calculated to disturb their peace and security, and, of course, in the case under consideration, it belongs to the slave-holding states to determine what is incendiary and intended to incite to insurrection, and to adopt such defensive measures as may be necessary for their security, with unlimited means of carrying them into effect, except
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