Sir, it was but the other day that we were forbidden, (properly forbidden I am sure, for the prohibition came from you,) to assume that there existed any intention to impose a prospective restraint on the domestic legislation of Missouri—­a restraint to act upon it contemporaneously with its origin as a State, and to continue adhesive to it through all the stages of its political existence.  We are now, however, permitted to know that it is determined by a sort of political surgery to amputate one of the limbs of its local sovereignty, and thus mangled and disparaged, and thus only, to receive it into the bosom of the Constitution.  It is now avowed that, while Maine is to be ushered into the Union with every possible demonstration of studious reverence on our part, and on hers, with colors flying, and all the other graceful accompaniments of honorable triumph, this ill-conditioned upstart of the West, this obscure foundling of a wilderness that was but yesterday the hunting-ground of the savage, is to find her way into the American family as she can, with an humiliating badge of remediless inferiority patched upon her garments, with the mark of recent, qualified manumission upon her, or rather with a brand upon her forehead to tell the stogy of her territorial vassalage, and to perpetuate the memory of her evil propensities.  It is now avowed that, while the robust district of Maine is to be seated by the side of her truly respectable parent, co-ordinate in authority and honor, and is to be dandled into that power and dignity of which she does not stand in need, but which undoubtedly she deserves, the more infantine and feeble Missouri is to be repelled with harshness, and forbidden to come at all, unless with the iron collar of servitude about her neck, instead of the civic crown of republican freedom upon her brows, and is to be doomed forever to leading-strings, unless she will exchange those leading-strings for shackles.

I am told that you have the power to establish this odious and revolting distinction, and I am referred for the proofs of that power to various parts of the Constitution, but principally to that part of it which authorizes the admission of new States into the Union.  I am myself of opinion that it is in that part only that the advocates for this restriction can, with any hope of success, apply for a license to impose it; and that the efforts which have been made to find it in other portions of that instrument, are too desperate to require to be encountered.  I shall, however, examine those other portions before I have done, lest it should be supposed by those who have relied upon them, that what I omit to answer I believe to be unanswerable.

The clause of the Constitution which relates to the admission of new States is in these words:  “The Congress may admit new States into this Union,” etc., and the advocates for restriction maintain that the use of the word “may” imports discretion to admit or to reject; and that in this discretion is wrapped up another—­that of prescribing the terms and conditions of admission in case you are willing to admit:  “Cujus est dare ejus est disponere.”  I will not for the present inquire whether this involved discretion to dictate the terms of admission belongs to you or not.  It is fit that I should first look to the nature and extent of it.