These, in substance, were the principles now brought into direct collision, urged under a great variety of forms, and recurring upon the successive details of the Constitution, as its formation proceeded, and pressed with equal earnestness and equally firm convictions of duty on both sides. I confess that it does not seem to me important, if it be practicable, to decide which party was theoretically correct. A great deal of the reasoning on both sides was speculative, and it is not easy to deny some of the chief propositions which were maintained on the one side and the other. We are too apt, perhaps, to judge of the real soundness of the opinions held by opposite parties to the first compromise of the Constitution, by the subsequent history and success of the government, and by the views and feelings which we entertain of that history and that success. Whereas, in truth, if we place ourselves at the point where the framers of the Constitution stood at the time we are examining, we shall find that, with the exception of the influence due to one or two governing facts of previous history, it was theoretically as correct to contend for a purely federal as for a purely national government. Almost everything depends upon the object towards which they were to reason; and therefore the premises were in a considerable degree open to an arbitrary choice. If the object was to establish a government, against the exercise of whose legitimate powers State legislation could not possibly be exerted, some higher authority than that of the State governments must be resorted to; and the reasoning which tended to prove the existence of that authority and the practicability of invoking it, and the danger of any other kind of government, comes logically and consistently in support of the great purpose to be attained. If, however, from an honest fear for the safety of local interests, the purpose was to have a government that would not seriously diminish the powers of the States, but would leave them with always unimpaired sovereignties, capable of resisting the measures of the central power, then the States were certainly competent and sufficient to the formation of such a system, and the reasoning which placed them in the light of parties to a social compact was theoretically true. On the one side, it was believed that a government formed by the States upon the principle of federal equality would be destructive of the powers of the general government, whatever those powers might be. On the other side, it was considered that the principle of governing by a democratic majority of the people of all the States would make those powers too formidable for the safety of the State constitutions. According to the force we may assign to the one or the other tendency, the reasoning on either side will appear to us to be almost equally correct.