to those States the empty shadows of domestic sovereignty, and convert them into petty pageants, in themselves contemptible, but rendered infinitely more so by the contrast of their humble faculties with the proud and admitted pretensions of those who having doomed them to the inferiority of vassals, have condescended to take them into their society and under their protection? "New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union." It is objected that the word "may" imports power, not obligation--a right to decide--a discretion to grant or refuse. To this it might be answered that power is duty on many occasions. But let it be conceded that it is discretionary. What consequence follows? A power to refuse, in a case like this, does not necessarily involve a power to exact terms. You must look to the result which is the declared object of the power. Whether you will arrive at it, or not, may depend on your will; but you cannot compromise with the result intended and professed. What then is the professed result? To admit a State into this Union. What is that Union? A confederation of States equal in sovereignty--capable of everything which the Constitution does not forbid, or authorize Congress to forbid. It is an equal union, between parties equally sovereign. They were sovereign independently of the Union. The object of the Union was common protection for the exercise of already existing sovereignty. The parties gave up a portion of that sovereignty to insure the remainder. As far as they gave it up by the common compact they have ceased to be sovereign. The Union provides the means of defending the residue; and it is into that Union that a new State is to come. By acceding to it, the new State is placed on the same footing with the original States. It accedes for the same purpose, i.e., protection for their unsurrendered sovereignty. If it comes in shorn of its beams--crippled and disparaged beyond the original States, it is not into the original Union that it comes. For it is a different sort of Union. The first was Union _inter pares_. This is a Union between "_disparates_"--between giants and a dwarf--between power and feebleness--between full proportioned sovereignties and a miserable image of power--a thing which that very Union has shrunk and shrivelled from its just size, instead of preserving it in its true dimensions. It is into this Union, i. e., the Union of the Federal Constitution, that you are to admit, or refuse to admit. You can admit into no other. You cannot make the Union, as to the new State, what it is not as to the old; for then it is not this Union that you open for the entrance of a new party. If you make it enter into a new and additional compact, is it any longer the same Union?