against treason or murder.  Now, is this regulating commerce, or destroying it?  Is it guiding, controlling, giving the rule to commerce, as a subsisting thing or is it putting an end to it altogether?  Nothing is more certain, than that a majority in New England deemed this law a violation of the Constitution.  The very case required by the gentleman to justify State interference had then arisen.  Massachusetts believed this law to be “a deliberate, palpable, and dangerous exercise of a power not granted by the Constitution.”  Deliberate it was, for it was long continued; palpable she thought it, as no words in the Constitution gave the power, and only a construction, in her opinion most violent, raised it; dangerous it was, since it threatened utter ruin to her most important interests.  Here, then, was a Carolina case.  How did Massachusetts deal with it?  It was, as she thought, a plain, manifest, palpable violation of the Constitution, and it brought ruin to her doors.  Thousands of families, and hundreds of thousands of individuals, were beggared by it.  While she saw and felt all this, she saw and felt also, that, as a measure of national policy, it was perfectly futile; that the country was no way benefited by that which caused so much individual distress; that it was efficient only for the production of evil, and all that evil inflicted on ourselves.  In such a case, under such circumstances, how did Massachusetts demean herself?  Sir, she remonstrated, she memorialized, she addressed herself to the general government, not exactly “with the concentrated energy of passion,” but with her own strong sense, and the energy of sober conviction.  But she did not interpose the arm of her own power to arrest the law, and break the embargo.  Far from it.  Her principles bound her to two things; and she followed her principles, lead where they might.  First, to submit to every constitutional law of Congress, and secondly, if the constitutional validity of the law be doubted, to refer that question to the decision of the proper tribunals.  The first principle is vain and ineffectual without the second.  A majority of us in New England believed the embargo law unconstitutional; but the great question was, and always will be in such cases, Who is to decide this?  Who is to judge between the people and the government?  And, Sir, it is quite plain, that the Constitution of the United States confers on the government itself, to be exercised by its appropriate department, and under its own responsibility to the people, this power of deciding ultimately and conclusively upon the just extent of its own authority.  If this had not been done, we should not have advanced a single step beyond the old Confederation.