A mere conglomeration of emigrants, Indian traders, and half-breeds was invested with all the functions of a mature and ripened civilization.  Long ere there were people enough in any Territory to furnish the officers of a regular government,—­before they possessed any of the apparatus of court-houses, jails, legislative chambers, etc., essential to a regular government,—­before they lived near enough to each other, in fact, to constitute a respectable town-meeting,—­before they could pay the expenses or gather the means of their own defence from the Indians, these wonderful entities were held to be endowed with the right of entering into the most complicated relations and of forming the most important institutions for themselves,—­and not only for themselves, but for their posterity.

This puerile dogma was asserted ostensibly in the interest of Slavery, in order to get rid of the power of Congress over that subject; but the real source of it was the cowardice of those invertebrate and timorous politicians who desired to evade the responsibility of expressing opinions concerning this power.  General Cass was the putative father of it, and it might well have come from one of his pliancy and calibre; but as Slavery itself, embodied in the person of Calhoun, scouted the feeble bantling, there was soon no one so mean as to confess the paternity.  Abandoned of its begetters, Squatter Sovereignty wandered the streets like a squalid and orphaned outcast, begging anybody and everybody to take it in, and finding no creditable welcome anywhere.

Calhoun and his friends, no less anxious than Cass and his friends to rescue Slavery from the discretion of Congress, though for other reasons, contrived to find a more respectable excuse for such a policy.  As California and New Mexico—­both free soil—­had lately been acquired, they contended that the moment new territories attached to the United States, the same moment the Constitution attached to them; and inasmuch as the Constitution guarantied the existence of Slavery, presto, Slavery must be regarded as existing under it in the Territories!  This, we say, was more respectable ground than Squatter Sovereignty, because it met the question more fairly in the face; yet, considered either as dialectics or history, it was not one whit less absurd.  We do not wonder that Webster, and all the other sound lawyers of the nation, heard such an announcement of Constitutional hermeneutics with utter surprise and astonishment.  It was enough to astound even the veriest tyro in the law.  The Constitution—­and especially by all the premises of the State-Rights school—­is a mere compact between the States; it confers no powers but delegated and enumerated powers, and such as are indispensable to the execution of these; and nowhere is there a clause or letter in it extending its operation beyond the States.  Even in respect to acknowledged powers, these are inoperative until carried into effect by a special act of Congress; they have no vitality in themselves,—­they are only dead provisions or forms till Congress has breathed into them the breath of life; and thence to argue that of their own energy they may leap into or embrace the Territories is to argue that a corpse may on its own motion rise and walk.