been affectedly called, authorizes the National Legislature to pass all necessary and proper laws. If there is anything exceptionable, it must be sought for in the specific powers, upon which this general declaration is predicated. The declaration itself, though it may be chargeable with tautology or redundancy, is at least perfectly harmless.
But suspicion may ask, Why then was it introduced? The answer is, that it could only have been done for greater caution, and to guard against all cavilling refinements in those who might hereafter feel a disposition to curtail and evade the legitimate authorities of the Union. The Convention probably foresaw, what it has been a principal aim of these papers to inculcate, that the danger which most threatens our political welfare is, that the State Governments will finally sap the foundations of the Union; and might therefore think it necessary, in so cardinal a point, to leave nothing to construction. Whatever may have been the inducement to it, the wisdom of the precaution is evident from the cry which has been raised against it; as that very cry betrays a disposition to question the great and essential truth which it is manifestly the object of that provision to declare.
But it may be again asked, who is to judge of the necessity and propriety of the laws to be passed for executing the powers of the Union? I answer, first, that this question arises as well and as fully upon the simple grant of those powers, as upon the declaratory clause: and I answer in the second place, that the National Government, like every other, must judge, in the first instance, of the proper exercise of its powers, and its constituents in the last. If the Fœderal Government should overpass the just bounds of its authority and make a tyrannical use of its powers, the People, whose creature it is, must appeal to the standard they have
