It is true that the Constitution may authorize the general Government to limit the powers of the Commonwealths in regard to certain specified points and the federal system be still preserved, but a general authority in the general Government to do so, such as was claimed by the restrictionists from the vague provision vesting in Congress the power to "admit new States into this Union," amounts to nothing less than a claim of sovereignty by Congress over the new Commonwealths. Such was not the system which those who framed and ratified the Constitution intended to establish. Such is not the system which comports with the vast territorial extent and the climatic differences of the United States, and with the ethnical variety of the population of the country.
It is also true that those who resisted the restriction upon Missouri used terms and propositions, in reference to the genesis of the Union and the relation of the general Government to the Commonwealths, which will hardly bear the test of correct history and exact political science, but they had the true principle in respect to the point at issue, when they held that "the State," in the sense of the Constitution, is defined in the Constitution; that its powers are the residue after what the Constitution vests exclusively in the general { 92} Government and denies to the "States" shall have been subtracted from sovereignty; and that Congress cannot vary these relations under an interpretation of a general provision. They conceded that Congress might, as the general principle, admit or not admit, as it might judge proper, with all that this involved in reference to geographical boundaries and ripeness of the population for self-government, but they held that the thing admitted was created by the Constitution, through the people inhabiting the district to be formed into a Commonwealth, and not by Congress. And they repudiated the idea that the Declaration of Independence is any part of the constitutional law of the country, or that Congress can define the republican form of government which the United States is obligated by the Constitution to guarantee to every Commonwealth, in any other sense than that concretely expressed in the original Commonwealths.