Page:Nature and Character of our Federal Government.djvu/71

in strict conformity with the recommendations, resolutions and laws of congress and the State legislatures. And as "the people of the United States" did not, in point of fact, take the subject into their own hands, independent of the constituted authorities, they could not do it by any agency of those authorities. So far as the federal government was concerned, the articles of confederation, from which alone it derived its power, contained no provision by which "the people of the United States" could express authoritatively a joint and common purpose to change their government. A law of congress authorizing them to do so would have been void, for want of right in that body to pass it. No mode, which congress might have prescribed for ascertaining the will of the people upon the subject, could have had that sanction of legal authority, which would have been absolutely necessary to give it force and effect. It is equally clear that there was no right or power reserved to the States themselves, by virtue of which any such authoritative expression of the common will and purpose of the people of all the States could have been made. The power and jurisdiction of each state were limited to its own territory; it had no power to legislate for the people of any other State. No single State, therefore, could have effected such an object; and if they had all concurred in it, each acting, as it was only authorized to act, for itself, that would have been strictly the action of the States as such, and as [ *58 ]*contradistinguished from the action of the mass of the people of all the States. If "the people of the United States" could not, by any aid to be derived from their common government, have effected such a change in their constitution, that government itself was equally destitute of all power to do so. The only clause in the articles of confederation, touching this subject, is in the following words: "And the articles of this confederation shall be inviolably observed by every State, and the union shall be perpetual; nor shall any alteration, at any time hereafter, be made in any of them, unless such alteration be agreed to in congress of the United States, and be afterwards confirmed by the legislature of every State." Even if this power had been given to congress alone, without subjecting the exercise of it to the negative of the States, it would still have been the power of the States in their separate