To this it might be answered that power is duty on many occasions.  But let it be conceded that it is discretionary.  What consequence follows?  A power to refuse, in a case like this, does not necessarily involve a power to exact terms.  You must look to the result which is the declared object of the power.  Whether you will arrive at it, or not, may depend on your will; but you cannot compromise with the result intended and professed.

What then is the professed result?  To admit a State into this Union.

What is that Union?  A confederation of States equal in sovereignty—­capable of everything which the Constitution does not forbid, or authorize Congress to forbid.  It is an equal union, between parties equally sovereign.  They were sovereign independently of the Union.  The object of the Union was common protection for the exercise of already existing sovereignty.  The parties gave up a portion of that sovereignty to insure the remainder.  As far as they gave it up by the common compact they have ceased to be sovereign.  The Union provides the means of defending the residue; and it is into that Union that a new State is to come.  By acceding to it, the new State is placed on the same footing with the original States.  It accedes for the same purpose, i.e., protection for their unsurrendered sovereignty.  If it comes in shorn of its beams—­crippled and disparaged beyond the original States, it is not into the original Union that it comes.  For it is a different sort of Union.  The first was Union inter pares.  This is a Union between “disparates”—­between giants and a dwarf—­between power and feebleness—­between full proportioned sovereignties and a miserable image of power—­a thing which that very Union has shrunk and shrivelled from its just size, instead of preserving it in its true dimensions.

It is into this Union, i. e., the Union of the Federal Constitution, that you are to admit, or refuse to admit.  You can admit into no other.  You cannot make the Union, as to the new State, what it is not as to the old; for then it is not this Union that you open for the entrance of a new party.  If you make it enter into a new and additional compact, is it any longer the same Union?

We are told that admitting a State into the Union is a compact.  Yes, but what sort of a compact?  A compact that it shall be a member of the Union, as the Constitution has made it.  You cannot new fashion it.  You may make a compact to admit, but when admitted the original compact prevails.  The Union is a compact, with a provision of political power and agents for the accomplishment of its objects.  Vary that compact as to a new State—­give new energy to that political power so as to make it act with more force upon a new State than upon the old—­make the will of those agents more effectually the arbiter of the fate of a new State than of the old, and it may be confidently said that the new State has not entered into this Union, but into another Union.  How far the Union has been varied is another question.  But that it has been varied is clear.