the nation, and the part most worthy of immortality. By it the National Constitution must be interpreted; or rather, the two together are the Constitution,--as Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights together are the British Constitution. By the Declaration our nation was born and its vital principles were announced; by the Constitution the nation was born again and supplied with the machinery of government. The two together are our National Scriptures, each being a Testament. * * * * * Against this conclusion there has been from the beginning one perpetual pretension in the name of States. The same spirit which has been so hostile to national unity in other countries, which made each feudal chief a petty sovereign, which for a long time convulsed France, which for centuries divided Italy, and which, unhappily, still divides Germany, has appeared among us. Assuming that communities never “sovereign” while colonies, and independent only by the national power, had in some way, by some sudden hocus-pocus, leaped into local sovereignty, and forgetting also that two sovereignties cannot coexist in the same place, as, according to the early dramatist, “Two kings in England cannot reign at once,”[75] the States insisted upon sovereign powers justly belonging to the Nation. Long ago the duel began. The partisans of State pretensions, plausibly professing to _decentralize_ the Government, have done everything possible to _denationalize_ it. In the name of self-government, they have organized local lordships hostile to Human Rights; in the name of the States, they have sacrificed the Nation. This pretension, constantly showing itself, has broken out on three principal occasions. The first was in the effort of Nullification, which occurred in 1832, where, under the lead of Mr. Calhoun, South Carolina attempted to nullify the Revenue Acts of Congress, or, in other words, to declare them void within her limits. After encountering the matchless argument of Daniel Webster, enforced by his best eloquence, Nullification was blasted by the thunderbolt of Andrew Jackson, who, in his Proclamation, as President, thus exposed it, even in the form of Secession, which it assumed at a later day: “Each State, having expressly parted with so many powers as to constitute jointly with the other States _a single nation_, cannot from that period possess any right to secede, because such secession does not break a league, but destroys the unity of a nation.”[76] The pretension next showed itself in the Rebellion; and now that the Rebellion is crushed, it reappears in still another form, by insisting that each State at its own will may disregard the universal rights of the citizen, and apply a discrimination according to its own local prejudices,--thus within its borders nullifying the primal truths of the Declaration of Independence. Here again do State pretensions, in their anarchical egotism, interfere with the National Unity.