States; to erect temporary Governments; to appoint officers for them; and to prescribe the conditions on which such States shall be admitted into the Confederacy. All this has been done: and done without the least color of Constitutional authority. Yet no blame has been whispered; no alarm has been sounded. A great and independent fund of revenue is passing into the hands of a single body of men, who can raise troops to an indefinite number, and appropriate money to their support for an indefinite period of time. And yet there are men, who have not only been silent spectators of this prospect, but who are advocates for the system which exhibits it; and, at the same time, urge against the new system the objections which we have heard. Would they not act with more consistency, in urging the establishment of the latter, as no less necessary to guard the Union against the future powers and resources of a body constructed like the existing Congress, than to save it from the dangers threatened by the present impotency of that Assembly?
I mean not, by anything here said, to throw censure on the measures which have been pursued by Congress. I am sensible they could not have done otherwise. The public interest, the necessity of the case, imposed upon them the task of overleaping their Constitutional limits. But is not the fact an alarming proof of the danger resulting from a Government, which does not possess regular powers commensurate to its objects? A dissolution or usurpation is the dreadful dilemma to which it is continually exposed.
