And if they exceed this amount the excess shall belong to the United States.  And—­

No State shall without the consent of Congress lay any duty of tonnage, keep troops or ships of war in time of peace, enter into any agreement or compact with another State or with a foreign power, or engage in war, unless actually invaded or in such imminent danger as will not admit of delay.

In order still further to secure the uninterrupted exercise of these high powers against State interposition, it is provided:  that—­

This Constitution and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof, and all treaties made or which shall be made under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land, and the judges in every State shall be bound thereby, anything in the constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.

The solemn sanction of religion has been superadded to the obligations of official duty, and all Senators and Representatives of the United States, all members of State legislatures, and all executive and judicial officers, “both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by oath or affirmation to support this Constitution.”

In order to carry into effect these powers, the Constitution has established a perfect Government in all its forms—­legislative, executive, and judicial; and this Government to the extent of its powers acts directly upon the individual citizens of every State, and executes its own decrees by the agency of its own officers.  In this respect it differs entirely from the Government under the old Confederation, which was confined to making requisitions on the States in their sovereign character.  This left it in the discretion of each whether to obey or to refuse, and they often declined to comply with such requisitions.  It thus became necessary for the purpose of removing this barrier and “in order to form a more perfect union” to establish a Government which could act directly upon the people and execute its own laws without the intermediate agency of the States.  This has been accomplished by the Constitution of the United States.  In short, the Government created by the Constitution, and deriving its authority from the sovereign people of each of the several States, has precisely the same right to exercise its power over the people of all these States in the enumerated cases that each one of them possesses over subjects not delegated to the United States, but “reserved to the States respectively or to the people.”

To the extent of the delegated powers the Constitution of the United States is as much a part of the constitution of each State and is as binding upon its people as though it had been textually inserted therein.