would cripple commerce, inconvenience the public, and utterly destroy all comity between the States.  This exacting tolls for navigation of waters is one of the most offensive systems left us by past generations.  It is so odious that modern governments decline to submit to it in cases where there is no doubt as to ‘State rights,’ as in that of the ’Sound Dues’ exacted by Denmark.  If, however, the State is supreme within its limits, it has a perfect right to exact such tolls.  But no State in this nation has any such right under the Constitution.  Its existence would destroy the Union by placing each State under the laws and exactions of either one of the others.  The troubles growing out of such exactions would beget dispute; these disputes would beget open strife, which would end in open rupture and the downfall of the NATIONAL UNION.

The ‘UNITED STATES,’ ‘the Union,’ ‘the Nation,’ are supreme.  The States, as States, are subordinate; as ‘parts,’ they are inferior to the ‘whole.’  The ‘State rights’ doctrine is wrong, disorganizing, destructive of national life, and must be destroyed.

Again, one grand evidence of a nation’s or a people’s civilization, is found in the correspondence, written and printed, conducted by the citizens.  Barbarians have and need no correspondence.  Civilization needs it, and can not exist without it.  A migratory people like ours have more correspondence than older and less migratory nations.  A citizen emigrating from Vermont to Illinois must correspond with the friends of his old home.  The old friend in Vermont must know how the absent one ‘gets along in the world.’  To conduct this correspondence, the postal or mail service was devised.  Before its existence the communication between separated friends and business people was uncertain, irregular, and mere matter of chance, to be conveyed by stray travelers, or not interchanged at all.  The necessities of civilization brought the postal or mail service into action.  To conduct this service over a nation, requires the right of passage through the entire limits of the nation.  This right, to be available, must have power to enforce its own requirements.  It must be central, CONTROLLING, SUPREME.  Without these, there would be no safety, no system, no uniformity, no regularity.  To insure these to all the people of the States, the Constitution has wisely placed these powers in ‘THE CONGRESS’ of the Union, of the ‘NATION.’  In accordance with the powers thus vested in Congress, our present postal or mail service has been created.  No State has a right to set up its own mail or postal system.  No State has a right to interfere with the transportation of the national mails.  ‘The UNITED STATES MAIL,’ is the term used.  If any State had a right to establish a mail within its own limits, it would also have the right to prohibit or curtail the transportation of other States’ mails through its limits.  This right would destroy