I shall not, I am sure, be told that I exaggerate this power.  It has been admitted here and elsewhere that I do not.  But I want no such concession.  It is manifest that as a discretionary power it is everything or nothing—­that its head is in the clouds, or that it is a mere figment of enthusiastic speculation—­that it has no existence, or that it is an alarming vortex ready to swallow up all such portions of the sovereignty of an infant State as you may think fit to cast into it as preparatory to the introduction into the union of the miserable residue.  No man can contradict me when I say, that if you have this power, you may squeeze down a new-born sovereign State to the size of a pigmy, and then taking it between finger and thumb, stick it into some niche of the Union, and still continue by way of mockery to call it a State in the sense of the Constitution.  You may waste it to a shadow, and then introduce it into the society of flesh and blood an object of scorn and derision.  You may sweat and reduce it to a thing of skin and bone, and then place the ominous skeleton beside the ruddy and healthful members of the Union, that it may have leisure to mourn the lamentable difference between itself and its companions, to brood over its disastrous promotion, and to seek in justifiable discontent an opportunity for separation, and insurrection, and rebellion.  What may you not do by dexterity and perseverance with this terrific power?  You may give to a new State, in the form of terms which it cannot refuse, (as I shall show you hereafter,) a statute book of a thousand volumes—­providing not for ordinary cases only, but even for possibilities; you may lay the yoke, no matter whether light or heavy, upon the necks of the latest posterity; you may send this searching power into every hamlet for centuries to come, by laws enacted in the spirit of prophecy, and regulating all those dear relations of domestic concern which belong to local legislation, and which even local legislation touches with a delicate and sparing hand.  This is the first inroad.  But will it be the last?  This provision is but a pioneer for others of a more desolating aspect.  It is that fatal bridge of which Milton speaks, and when once firmly built, what shall hinder you to pass it when you please for the purpose of plundering power after power at the expense of new States, as you will still continue to call them, and raising up prospective codes irrevocable and immortal, which shall leave to those States the empty shadows of domestic sovereignty, and convert them into petty pageants, in themselves contemptible, but rendered infinitely more so by the contrast of their humble faculties with the proud and admitted pretensions of those who having doomed them to the inferiority of vassals, have condescended to take them into their society and under their protection?

“New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union.”  It is objected that the word “may” imports power, not obligation—­a right to decide—­a discretion to grant or refuse.