was who was to say whether a law was unconstitutional or not.  Each State has that authority, was the reply of the nullifiers, and if the decision is against the validity of the law it cannot be executed within the limits of the dissenting State.  The vigorous sarcasm with which Mr. Webster depicted practical nullification, and showed that it was nothing more or less than revolution when actually carried out, was really the conclusive answer to the nullifying doctrine.  But Mr. Calhoun and his school eagerly denied that nullification rested on the right to revolt against oppression.  They argued that it was a constitutional right; that they could live within the Constitution and beyond it,—­inside the house and outside it at one and the same time.  They contended that, the Constitution being a compact between the States, the Federal government was the creation of the States; yet, in the same breath, they declared that the general government was a party to the contract from which it had itself emanated, in order to get rid of the difficulty of proving that, while the single dissenting State could decide against the validity of a law, the twenty or more other States, also parties to the contract, had no right to deliver an opposite judgment which should be binding as the opinion of the majority of the court.  There was nothing very ingenious or very profound in the argument by which Mr. Webster demonstrated the absurdity of the doctrine which attempted to make nullification a peaceable constitutional privilege, when it could be in practice nothing else than revolution.  But the manner in which he put the argument was magnificent and final.  As he himself said, in this very speech of Samuel Dexter, “his statement was argument, his inference demonstration.”

The weak places in his armor were historical in their nature.  It was probably necessary, at all events Mr. Webster felt it to be so, to argue that the Constitution at the outset was not a compact between the States, but a national instrument, and to distinguish the cases of Virginia and Kentucky in 1799 and of New England in 1814, from that of South Carolina in 1830.  The former point he touched upon lightly, the latter he discussed ably, eloquently, ingeniously, and at length.  Unfortunately the facts were against him in both instances.  When the Constitution was adopted by the votes of States at Philadelphia, and accepted by the votes of States in popular conventions, it is safe to say that there was not a man in the country from Washington and Hamilton on the one side, to George Clinton and George Mason on the other, who regarded the new system as anything but an experiment entered upon by the States and from which each and every State had the right peaceably to withdraw, a right which was very likely to be exercised.  When the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions appeared they were not opposed on constitutional grounds, but on those of expediency and of hostility to the revolution which they were considered to embody.  Hamilton, and no one knew the Constitution better than he, treated them as the beginnings of an attempt to change the government, as the germs of a conspiracy to destroy the Union.  As Dr. Von Holst tersely and accurately states it, “there was no time as yet to attempt to strangle the healthy human mind in a net of logical deductions.”  That was the work reserved for John C. Calhoun.