By means of this skilful arrangement, a government, in which the singular condition is found of separate duties prescribed to the citizen by two distinct sovereignties, has operated with success. That success is to be measured not wholly, or chiefly, by the diversities of opinion on constitutional questions that may from time to time prevail; nor by the means, aside from the Constitution, that may sometimes have been thought of for counteracting its declared interpretation; but by the practical efficiency with which the powers of the Union have operated, and the general readiness to acquiesce in the limitations given to those powers by the department in which their construction is vested. This general acquiescence has steadily increased, from the period when the government was founded until the present day; and it has now come to be well understood, that there is no alternative to take the place of a ready submission to the national will, as expressed by or under the Constitution interpreted by the proper national organ, excepting a resort to methods that lie wholly without the Constitution, and that would completely subvert the principles on which it was founded. For while it is true that the people of each State constitute the sovereign power by which the rights and duties of its inhabitants not involved in the Constitution of the United States are to be exclusively governed, it is equally true that they do not constitute the whole of the sovereign power which governs those relations of its inhabitants that are committed to the national legislature. The framers of the Constitution resorted to an enactment of that instrument by the people of the United States, and employed language which speaks in their name, for the express purpose, among other things, of bringing into action a national authority, on certain subjects. The organs of the general government, therefore, are not the agents of the separate will of the people of each State, for certain specified purposes, as its State government is the agent of their separate will for all other purposes; but they are the agents of the will of a collective people, of which the inhabitants of a State are only a part. That the will of the whole should not be defeated by the will of a part, was the purpose of the supremacy assigned to the Constitution of the United States; and that the rights and liberties of each part, not subject to the will of the whole, should not be invaded, was the purpose of the careful enumeration of the objects to which that supremacy was to extend.