his new rules of syntax altogether.  We will not give up our forms of political speech to the grammarians of the school of nullification.  By the Constitution, we mean, not a “constitutional compact,” but, simply and directly, the Constitution, the fundamental law; and if there be one word in the language which the people of the United States understand, this is that word.  We know no more of a constitutional compact between sovereign powers, than we know of a constitutional indenture of copartnership, a constitutional deed of conveyance, or a constitutional bill of exchange.  But we know what the Constitution is; we know what the plainly written fundamental law is; we know what the bond of our Union and the security of our liberties is; and we mean to maintain and to defend it, in its plain sense and unsophisticated meaning.

The sense of the gentleman’s proposition, therefore, is not at all affected, one way or the other, by the use of this word.  That proposition still is, that our system of government is but a compact between the people of separate and sovereign States.

Was it Mirabeau, Mr. President, or some other master of the human passions, who has told us that words are things?  They are indeed things, and things of mighty influence, not only in addresses to the passions and high-wrought feelings of mankind, but in the discussion of legal and political questions also; because a just conclusion is often avoided, or a false one reached, by the adroit substitution of one phrase, or one word, for another.  Of this we have, I think, another example in the resolutions before us.

The first resolution declares that the people of the several States “acceded” to the Constitution, or to the constitutional compact, as it is called.  This word “accede,” not found either in the Constitution itself, or in the ratification of it by any one of the States, has been chosen for use here, doubtless, not without a well-considered purpose.

The natural converse of accession is secession; and, therefore, when it is stated that the people of the States acceded to the Union, it may be more plausibly argued that they may secede from it.  If, in adopting the Constitution, nothing was done but acceding to a compact, nothing would seem necessary, in order to break it up, but to secede from the same compact.  But the term is wholly out of place. Accession, as a word applied to political associations, implies coming into a league, treaty, or confederacy, by one hitherto a stranger to it; and secession implies departing from such league or confederacy.  The people of the United States have used no such form of expression in establishing the present government.  They do not say that they accede to a league, but they declare that they ordain and establish a Constitution, Such are the very words of the instrument itself; and in all the States, without an exception, the language used by their conventions was, that they “ratified the Constitution”; some of them employing the additional words “assented to” and “adopted,” but all of them “ratifying.”