Sir, let me recur to pleasing recollections; let me indulge in refreshing remembrances of the past; let me remind you that, in early times, no States cherished greater harmony, both of principle and feeling, than Massachusetts and South Carolina.  Would to God that harmony might again return!  Shoulder to shoulder they went through the Revolution, hand in hand they stood round the administration of Washington, and felt his own great arm lean on them for support.  Unkind feeling, if it exist, alienation, and distrust, are the growth, unnatural to such soils, of false principles since sown.  They are weeds, the seeds of which that same great arm never scattered.

Mr. President, I shall enter upon no encomium of Massachusetts; she needs none.  There she is.  Behold her, and judge for yourselves.  There is her history; the world knows it by heart.  The past, at least, is secure.  There is Boston, and Concord, and Lexington, and Bunker Hill; and there they will remain for ever.  The bones of her sons, falling in the great struggle for Independence, now lie mingled with the soil of every State from New England to Georgia, and there they will lie forever.  And, sir, where American Liberty raised its first voice, and where its youth was nurtured and sustained, there it still lives, in the strength of its manhood, and full of its original spirit.  If discord and disunion shall wound it, if party strife and blind ambition shall hawk and tear it, if folly and madness, if uneasiness under salutary and necessary restraint shall succeed in separating it from that Union, by which alone its existence is made sure, it will stand, in the end, by the side of that cradle in which its infancy was rocked; it will stretch forth its arm with whatever of vigor it may still retain, over the friends who gather round it; and it will fall at last, if fall it must, amidst the profoundest monuments of its own glory, and on the very spot of its origin.

There yet remains to be performed, Mr. President, by far the most grave and important duty which I feel to be devolved upon me by this occasion.  It is to state, and to defend, what I conceive to be the true principles of the Constitution under which we are here assembled.  I might well have desired that so weighty a task should have fallen into other and abler hands.  I could have wished that it should have been executed by those whose character and experience give weight and influence to their opinions, such as cannot possibly belong to mine.  But, sir, I have met the occasion, not sought it; and I shall proceed to state my own sentiments, without challenging for them any particular regard, with studied plainness, and as much precision as possible.

I understand the honorable gentleman from South Carolina to maintain that it is a right of the State Legislatures to interfere whenever, in their judgment, this government transcends its constitutional limits, and to arrest the operation of its laws.