void, or government must apply to the people of the States for new powers. Uriah Tracy of Connecticut replied to Taylor in a speech which was probably the best on his side of the question. His opposition to the purchase was grounded on a party reason: “The relative strength which this admission gives to a Southern and Western interest is contradictory to the principles of our original Union.” The President and Senate had no power to make States, and the treaty was void. “I have no doubt but we can obtain territory either by conquest or compact, and hold it, even all Louisiana and a thousand times more if you please, without violating the Constitution. We can hold territory; but to admit the inhabitants into the Union, to make citizens of them, and States, by treaty, we cannot constitutionally do; and no subsequent act of legislation, or even ordinary amendment to our Constitution, can legalize such measures. If done at all, they must be done by universal consent of all the States or partners to our political association; and this universal consent I am positive can never be obtained to such a pernicious measure as the admission of Louisiana,--of a world, and such a world, into our Union. This would be absorbing the Northern States, and rendering them as insignificant in the Union as they ought to be, if by their own consent the measure should be adopted.” Tracy’s speech was answered by Breckenridge of Kentucky, who had induced the Kentucky legislature, only five years before, to declare itself determined “tamely to submit to undelegated, and consequently unlimited, powers in no man or body of men on earth;” and to assert further that submission to the exercise of such powers “would be to surrender the form of government we have chosen, and to live under one deriving its powers from its own will, and not from our authority.” When he came to deal with the same question in a new form, he glided with extreme delicacy over the thin ice of the Constitution. His answer to Tracy was an admission. He pointed out that the Federalist argument carried centralization further than it was carried by this treaty. “By his construction,” said Breckenridge, “territories and citizens are considered and held as the property of the government of the United States, and may consequently be used as dangerous engines in the hands of the government against the States and people.” This was true. The Federalists maintained that such territory could be held only as property, not as part of the Union; and the consequences of this doctrine, if granted, were immense. Breckenridge argued that the admission by treaty of a foreign State was less dangerous, and therefore more constitutional, than such ownership of foreign territory. The conclusion was not perfectly logical, and was the less so because he denied the power in neither case. “Could we not,” he went on, quoting from Tracy’s speech, “incorporate in the Union some