“But,” the gentleman adds, “what shall we do, if we do not admit the people of Louisiana into our Union?  Our children are settling that country.”  Sir, it is no concern of mine what he does.  Because his children have run wild and uncovered into the woods, is that a reason for him to break into my house, or the houses of my friends, to filch our children’s clothes, in order to cover his children’s nakedness.  This Constitution never was, and never can be, strained to lap over all the wilderness of the West, without essentially affecting both the rights and convenience of its real proprietors.  It was never constructed to form a covering for the inhabitants of the Missouri and Red River country.  And whenever it is attempted to be stretched over them, it will rend asunder.  I have done with this part of my argument.  It rests upon this fundamental principle, that the proportion of political power, subject only to internal modifications, permitted by the Constitution, is an unalienable, essential, intangible right.  When it is touched, the fabric is annihilated; for, on the preservation of these proportions, depend our rights and liberties.

If we recur to the known relations existing among the States at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, the same conclusions will result.  The various interests, habits, manners, prejudices, education, situation, and views, which excited jealousies and anxieties in the breasts of some of our most distinguished citizens, touching the result of the proposed Constitution, were potent obstacles to its adoption.  The immortal leader of our Revolution, in his letter to the President of the old Congress, written as president of the convention which formed this compact, thus speaks on this subject:  “It is at all times difficult to draw, with precision, the line between those rights which must be surrendered, and those which may be reserved; and on the present occasion this difficulty was increased by a difference among the several States, as to their situation, extent, habits, and particular interests.”

The debates of that period will show that the effect of the slave votes upon the political influence of this part of the country, and the anticipated variation of the weight of power to the West, were subjects of great and just jealousy to some of the best patriots in the Northern and Eastern States.  Suppose, then, that it had been distinctly foreseen that, in addition to the effect of this weight, the whole population of a world beyond the Mississippi was to be brought into this and the other branch of the Legislature, to form our laws, control our rights, and decide our destiny.  Sir, can it be pretended that the patriots of that day would for one moment have listened to it?  They were not madmen.  They had not taken degrees at the hospital of idiocy.  They knew the nature of man, and the effect of his combinations in political societies.  They knew that when the weight of particular sections of a confederacy was