its exclusive jurisdiction, save that of hiring a scrivener to copy off the acts of the Maryland and Virginia legislatures as fast as they are passed, and engross them, under the title of “Laws of the United States for the District of Columbia!” A slight additional expense would also be incurred in keeping up an express between the capitols of those States and Washington city, bringing Congress from time to time its “instructions” from head quarters!

What a “glorious Union” this doctrine of Mr. Clay bequeaths to the people of the United States!  We have been permitted to set up at our own expense, and on our own territory, two great sounding-boards called “Senate Chamber” and “Representatives’ Hall,” for the purpose of sending abroad “by authority” national echoes of state legislation! —­permitted also to keep in our pay a corps of pliant national musicians, with peremptory instructions to sound on any line of the staff according as Virginia and Maryland may give the sovereign key note!

A careful analysis of Mr. Clay’s resolution and of the discussions upon it, will convince every fair mind that this is but the legitimate carrying out of the principle pervading both.  They proceed virtually upon the hypothesis that the will and pleasure of Virginia and Maryland are paramount to those of the Union.  If the original design of setting apart a federal district had been for the sole accommodation of the south, there could hardly have been higher assumption or louder vaunting.  The only object of having such a District was in effect totally perverted in the resolution of Mr. Clay, and in the discussions of the entire southern delegation, upon its passage.  Instead of taking the ground, that the benefit of the whole Union was the sole object of a federal district, and that it was to be legislated over for this end—­the resolution proceeds upon an hypothesis totally the reverse.  It takes a single point of state policy, and exalts it above NATIONAL interests, utterly overshadowing them; abrogating national rights; making void a clause of the Constitution; humbling the general government into a subject crouching for favors to a superior, and that too within its own exclusive jurisdiction.  All the attributes of sovereignty vested in Congress by the Constitution, it impales upon the point of an alleged implication.  And this is Mr. Clay’s peace-offering, to the lust of power and the ravenings of state encroachment!  A “compromise,” forsooth! that sinks the general government on its own territory, into a mere colony, with Virginia and Maryland for its “mother country!” It is refreshing to turn from these shallow, distorted constructions and servile cringings, to the high bearing of other southern men in other times; men, who as legislators and lawyers, scorned to accommodate their interpretations of constitutions and charters to geographical lines, or to bend them to the purposes of a political canvass.