If there be no power to settle such questions, independent of either of the States, is not the whole Union a rope of sand?  Are we not thrown back again, precisely, upon the old Confederation?

It is too plain to be argued.  Four-and-twenty interpreters of constitutional law, each with a power to decide for itself, and none with authority to bind anybody else, and this constitutional law the only bond of their union!  What is such a state of things but a mere connection during pleasure, or, to use the phraseology of the times, during feeling?  And that feeling, too, not the feeling of the people, who established the Constitution, but the feeling of the State governments.

In another of the South Carolina addresses, having premised that the crisis requires “all the concentrated energy of passion,” an attitude of open resistance to the laws of the Union is advised.  Open resistance to the laws, then, is the constitutional remedy, the conservative power of the State, which the South Carolina doctrines teach for the redress of political evils, real or imaginary.  And its authors further say, that, appealing with confidence to the Constitution itself, to justify their opinions, they cannot consent to try their accuracy by the courts of justice.  In one sense, indeed, Sir, this is assuming an attitude of open resistance in favor of liberty.  But what sort of liberty?  The liberty of establishing their own opinions, in defiance of the opinions of all others; the liberty of judging and of deciding exclusively themselves, in a matter in which others have as much right to judge and decide as they; the liberty of placing their own opinions above the judgment of all others, above the laws, and above the Constitution.  This is their liberty, and this is the fair result of the proposition contended for by the honorable gentleman.  Or, it may be more properly said, it is identical with it, rather than a result from it.

In the same publication we find the following:  “Previously to our Revolution, when the arm of oppression was stretched over New England, where did our Northern brethren meet with a braver sympathy than that which sprung from the bosoms of Carolinians?  We had no extortion, no oppression, no collision with the king’s ministers, no navigation interests springing up, in envious rivalry of England.”

This seems extraordinary language.  South Carolina no collision with the king’s ministers in 1775!  No extortion!  No oppression!  But, Sir, it is also most significant language.  Does any man doubt the purpose for which it was penned?  Can anyone fail to see that it was designed to raise in the reader’s mind the question, whether, at this time,—­that is to say, in 1828,—­South Carolina has any collision with the king’s ministers, any oppression, or extortion, to fear from England? whether, in short, England is not as naturally the friend of South Carolina as New England, with her navigation interests springing up in envious rivalry of England?