struck the country with amazement.  It was incredible and inconceivable that South Carolina should plunge headlong into resistance to the laws on a matter of opinion, and on a question in which the preponderance of opinion, both of the present day and of all past time, was so overwhelmingly against her.  The ordinance declares that Congress has exceeded its just power by laying duties on imports, intended for the protection of manufactures.  This is the opinion of South Carolina; and on the strength of that opinion she nullifies the laws.  Yet has the rest of the country no right to its opinion also?  Is one State to sit sole arbitress?  She maintains that those laws are plain, deliberate, and palpable violations of the Constitution; that she has a sovereign right to decide this matter; and that, having so decided, she is authorized to resist their execution by her own sovereign power; and she declares that she will resist it, though such resistance should shatter the Union into atoms.

Mr. President, I do not intend to discuss the propriety of these laws at large; but I will ask, How are they shown to be thus plainly and palpably unconstitutional?  Have they no countenance at all in the Constitution itself?  Are they quite new in the history of the government?  Are they a sudden and violent usurpation on the rights of the States?  Sir, what will the civilized world say, what will posterity say, when they learn that similar laws have existed from the very foundation of the government, that for thirty years the power was never questioned, and that no State in the Union has more freely and unequivocally admitted it than South Carolina herself?

To lay and collect duties and imposts is an express power granted by the Constitution to Congress.  It is, also, an exclusive power; for the Constitution as expressly prohibits all the States from exercising it themselves.  This express and exclusive power is unlimited in the terms of the grant, but is attended with two specific restrictions:  first, that all duties and imposts shall be equal in all the States; second, that no duties shall be laid on exports.  The power, then, being granted, and being attended with these two restrictions, and no more, who is to impose a third restriction on the general words of the grant?  If the power to lay duties, as known among all other nations, and as known in all our history, and as it was perfectly understood when the Constitution was adopted, includes a right of discriminating while exercising the power, and of laying some duties heavier and some lighter, for the sake of encouraging our own domestic products, what authority is there for giving to the words used in the Constitution a new, narrow, and unusual meaning?  All the limitations which the Constitution intended, it has expressed; and what it has left unrestricted is as much a part of its will as the restraints which it has imposed.