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1850] Calhoun and "nullification" 409 States, was, they said, when viewed from the side of the effects it would have upon their own people, only an indirect way and not a very indirect way either of making the South, which could not engage in manufactures, support the people of the North, who could. It would curtail the commerce of the southern ports and markets without furnishing any countervailing advantage to offset the loss. That had been the ground of South Carolina's " nullification. 11 Calhoun had not led her into that singular course: he had followed her into it. He had hitherto held his mind to a national scale of thinking ; but the distress of his own people swung him about, to study the causes of their disquietude. He accepted, when it was pressed upon him, their own explanation of the decline of their commerce and the falling off in the price of their cotton. He believed, as they did, that these things were due to an inequitable distribution of the burdens of federal taxation: that the South was being made to pay for the maintenance of manufactures in the North. He accordingly supplied them with weapons of defence, with constitutional arguments which went the whole length of an absolute refusal to obey oppressive and unequal laws, with the full-wrought doctrine of nullification. Calhoun did not invent the doctrine of nullification. It had been mentioned and urged in South Carolina again and again before he had been brought to accept it mentioned very explicitly and urged very passionately. He had turned very reluctantly from national plans to sectional defence ; and only because men who were his intimate friends and close political associates at home, as well as events happening under his own eyes at Washington, convinced him of the critical peril of the southern States. But when he did turn it was with eyes wide open and with all the passion of his nature, and with the passion of his mind also, that singular instrument of power, which gave order, precision, and a keen and burning force to whatever it touched. The doctrine of State Rights, which other men had used for protest, for exhortation, for advantage in debate, he used as if for legal demonstration. He made of it a philosophy of right, a statesman's fundamental tenet. The very coolness and precision of his way of reasoning seemed to make the doctrine a new and wiser thing. In every sentence, too, there was added to the sharp lines of reason the unmistakeable glow of conviction. Once convinced of the necessity of this his new line of action, he followed it with the zest of a crusader. "As to the responsibility necessarily incurred," he said, "in giving publicity to doctrines which a large portion of the community will probably consider new and dangerous, I feel none. I have too deep a conviction of their truth and vital importance to the Constitution, the Union, and the liberty of these States, to have the least uneasiness on- the point." He believed "the great and leading principle" of the political life of the Union to be, " that the general government emanated from the CH. xin.