vast and clear mind of the late chief justice of the United States, which never failed to disembarrass and elucidate the most obscure and intricate subject, appears to have shrunk from this. In all his judicial opinions in which the question has been presented, the unity or identity of the people of the United States has been taken as a postulatum, without one serious attempt to prove it. The continued repetition of this idea, and the boldness with which it is advanced, have, I am induced to think, given it an undue credit with the public. Few men, far too few, enquire narrowly into the subject, and even those who do, are not in general sceptical enough to doubt [ *62 ]*what is so often and so peremptorily asserted; and asserted, too, with that sort of hardy confidence which seems to say, that all argument to prove it true would be supererogatory and useless. It is not, therefore, out of place, nor out of time, to refresh the memory of the reader, in regard to those well established historical facts, which are sufficient in themselves, to prove that the foundation on which the consolidationists build their theory is unsubstantial and fallacious.
I would not be understood as contending, in what I have already said, that the Constitution is necessarily federative, merely because it was made by the States as such, and not by the aggregate people of the United States. I readily admit, that although the previous system was strictly federative, and could not have been changed except by the States who made it, yet there was nothing to prevent the States from surrendering, in the provisions of the new system which they adopted, all their power, and even their separate existence, if they chose to do so. The true enquiry is, therefore, whether they have in fact done so, or not; or, in other words, what is the true character, in this respect, of the present Constitution. In this enquiry, the history of their previous condition, and of the Constitution itself, is highly influential and important.
The author, carrying out the idea of a unity between the people of the United States, which, in the previous part of his work, he had treated as a postulatum, very naturally, and indeed necessarily, concludes that the Constitution is not a compact among sovereign States. He contends that it is "not a contract imposing mutual obligations, and contemplating the
