It is useless to demand consistency in a
growing body. How futile for Virginia and Rhode Island, for instance,
to declare that all power granted under the Constitution proceeds from
the people of the United States and that, whenever the same is
perverted, it may be resumed by them! Being adopted in State conventions
and voicing the sentiment of the people in these established groups,
is it unlikely that they meant the people of the United States as
grouped into the several States precisely as they had formed and were
now adopting their Constitution? Yet a generation or two later, Virginia
was to be told that she meant the people of the entire United States,
regardless of State lines, and in this opinion the people of Rhode
Island in that generation would join.
How useless for South Carolina to make as part of her ratification the
precautionary statement that no part of the Constitution should ever
be construed so that the States might be deprived of any power not
expressly relinquished by them! How fruitless for New Hampshire to
stipulate that all powers not expressly delegated by the Constitution
should be reserved to the several States to be exercised by them! How
profitless fate was to make the stipulations of New York that Congress
should never lay any kind of excise except on ardent spirits, and that
the clauses in the Constitution forbidding Congress to do certain
things should not be construed into a permission to do anything except
that which was named in the document! Time was soon to demonstrate the
folly of attempting to place these barriers in the path of progress.
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