The argument that the compact may be enforced, shows that the Federal predicament changed.  The power of the Union not only acts on persons or citizens, but on the faculty of the government, and restrains it in a way which the Constitution nowhere authorizes.  This new obligation takes away a right which is expressly “reserved to the people or the States,” since it is nowhere granted to the government of the Union.  You cannot do indirectly what you cannot do directly.  It is said that this Union is competent to make compacts.  Who doubts it?  But can you make this compact?  I insist that you cannot make it, because it is repugnant to the thing to be done.

The effect of such a compact would be to produce that inequality in the Union, to which the Constitution, in all its provisions, is adverse.  Everything in it looks to equality among the members of the Union.  Under it you cannot produce inequality.  Nor can you get before-hand of the Constitution, and do it by anticipation.  Wait until a State is in the Union, and you cannot do it; yet it is only upon the State in the Union that what you do begins to act.

But it seems that, although the proposed restrictions may not be justified by the clause of the Constitution which gives power to admit new States into the Union, separately considered, there are other parts of the Constitution which, combined with that clause, will warrant it.  And first, we are informed that there is a clause in this instrument which declares that Congress shall guarantee to every State a republican form of government; that slavery and such a form of government are incompatible; and, finally, as a conclusion from these premises, that Congress not only have a right, but are bound to exclude slavery from a new State.  Here again, sir, there is an edifying inconsistency between the argument and the measure which it professes to vindicate.  By the argument it is maintained that Missouri cannot have a republican form of government, and at the same time tolerate negro slavery.  By the measure it is admitted that Missouri may tolerate slavery, as to persons already in bondage there, and be nevertheless fit to be received into the Union.  What sort of constitutional mandate is this which can thus be made to bend and truckle and compromise as if it were a simple rule of expediency that might admit of exceptions upon motives of countervailing expediency.  There can be no such pliancy in the peremptory provisions of the Constitution.  They cannot be obeyed by moieties and violated in the same ratio.  They must be followed out to their full extent, or treated with that decent neglect which has at least the merit of forbearing to render contumacy obtrusive by an ostentatious display of the very duty which we in part abandon.  If the decalogue could be observed in this casuistical manner, we might be grievous sinners, and yet be liable to no reproach.  We might persist in all our habitual irregularities, and still be spotless.  We might, for example, continue to covet our neighbors’ goods, provided they were the same neighbors whose goods we had before coveted—­and so of all the other commandments.