Speeches of John C. Calhoun and Daniel Webster, in the Senate of the United States, on the Enforcing Bill

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Page 84 - To establish public institutions, rewards, and immunities, for the promotion of agriculture, commerce, trades, and manufactures.
Page 66 - Do, in the name and in behalf of the people of Virginia, declare and make known, that the powers granted under the Constitution, being derived from the people of the United States, be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression...
Page 57 - This, sir, is practical nullification 1. That the constitution of the United States is not a league, confederacy, or compact, between the people of the several States in their sovereign capacities; but a Government proper, founded on the adoption of the people, and creating direct relations between itself and individuals.
Page 51 - Government is not made the final judge of the powers delegated to it, since that would make its discretion, and not the Constitution, the measure of its powers, but that, as in all other cases of compact among sovereign parties, without any common judge, each has an equal right to judge for itself, as well of the infraction, as of the mode and measure of redress.
Page 67 - WE, THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES, DO ORDAIN AND ESTABLISH THIS CONSTITUTION." These words must cease to be a part of the Constitution, they must be obliterated from the parchment on which they are written, before any human ingenuity or human argument can remove the popular basis on which that Constitution rests, and turn the instrument into a mere compact between sovereign States.
Page 89 - I shall exert every faculty I possess in aiding to prevent the Constitution from being nullified, destroyed, or impaired; and even should I see it fall, I will still, with a voice feeble, perhaps, but earnest as ever issued from human lips, and with fidelity and zeal which nothing shall extinguish, call on the PEOPLE to come to its rescue.
Page 45 - That the assertions, that the people of these United States, taken collectively as individuals, are now, or ever have been, united on the principle of the social compact, and, as such, are now formed into one nation or people...
Page 61 - The sovereignty of government is an idea belonging to the other side of the Atlantic. No such thing is known in North America. Our governments are all limited. In Europe, sovereignty is of feudal origin, and imports no more than the state of the sovereign. It comprises his rights, duties, exemptions, prerogatives, and powers. I But with us, all power is with the people. They alone are sovereign; and they erect what governments they please, and confer on them such powers as they please.
Page 47 - The first two resolutions of the honorable member affirm these propositions, viz.: 1. That the political system under which we live, and under which Congress is now assembled, is a compact, to which the people of the several States, as separate and sovereign communities, are the parties. 2. That these sovereign parties have a right to judge, each for itself, of any alleged violation of the Constitution by Congress; and, in case of such violation, to choose, each for itself, its own mode and measure...
Page 24 - 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.

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