Secondly, Poland.  Poland is not the country which an American would naturally visit to gain political wisdom.  Mr. Calhoun, however, repairs thither, and brings home the fact, that in the turbulent Diet of that unhappy kingdom every member had an absolute veto upon every measure.  Nay, more:  no king could be elected without the unanimous vote of an assembly of one hundred and fifty thousand persons.  Yet Poland lasted two centuries!  The history of those two centuries is a sufficient comment upon Mr Calhoun’s system, to say nothing of the final catastrophe, which Mr. Calhoun confesses was owing to “the extreme to which the principle was carried.”  A sound principle cannot be carried to an unsafe extreme; it is impossible for a man to be too right.  If it is right for South Carolina to control and nullify the United States, it is right for any one man in South Carolina to control and nullify South Carolina.  One of the tests of a system is to ascertain where it will carry us if it is pushed to the uttermost extreme.  Mr. Calhoun gave his countrymen this valuable information when he cited the lamentable case of Poland.

From Poland the author descends to the Six Nations, the federal council of which was composed of forty-two members, each of whom had an absolute veto upon every measure.  Nevertheless, this confederacy, he says, became the most powerful and the most united of all the Indian nations.  He omits to add, that it was the facility with which this council could be wielded by the French and English in turn, that hastened the grinding of the Six Nations to pieces between those two millstones.

Rome is Mr. Calhoun’s next illustration.  The Tribunus Plebis, he observes, had a veto upon the passage of all laws and upon the execution of all laws, and thus prevented the oppression of the plebeians by the patricians.  To show the inapplicability of this example to the principle in question, to show by what steps this tribunal, long useful and efficient, gradually absorbed the power of the government, and became itself, first oppressive, and then an instrument in the overthrow of the constitution, would be to write a history of Rome.  Niebuhr is accessible to the public, and Niebuhr knew more of the Tribunus Plebis than Mr. Calhoun.  We cannot find in Niebuhr anything to justify the author’s aim to constitute patrician Carolina the Tribunus Plebis of the United States.

Lastly, England.  England, too, has that safeguard of liberty, “an organism by which the voice of each order or class is taken through its appropriate organ, and which requires the concurring voice of all to constitute that of the whole community.”  These orders are King, Lords, and Commons.  They must all concur in every law, each having a veto upon the action of the two others.  The government of the United States is also so arranged that the President and the two Houses of Congress must concur in every enactment; but then they all represent the same