foreign nation containing ten millions of inhabitants,--Africa, for instance,--and thereby destroy our government? Certainly the thing would be possible if Congress would do it and the people consent to it.... The true construction must depend on the manifest import of the instrument and the good sense of the community.” What then had become of the old Republican principle that acts of undelegated authority were no acts at all? Or had the States really delegated to the President and two thirds of the Senate the right to “destroy our government”? If Breckenridge had expressed these ideas in his Kentucky Resolutions, American history would have contained less dispute as to the meaning of State-rights and the powers of the central government; but Breckenridge himself would have then led the Federalist, not the Republican party. Breckenridge’s speech was followed by one from Pickering’s colleague, the young senator from Massachusetts, son of John Adams, the Federalist President whom Jefferson had succeeded. The Federalist majority in Massachusetts was divided; one portion followed the lead of the Essex Junto, the other and larger part yielded unwillingly to the supremacy of Alexander Hamilton and George Cabot. When in the spring of 1803 both seats of Massachusetts in the United States Senate became by chance vacant at once, the Essex Junto wished to choose Timothy Pickering for the long term. The moderate Federalists set Pickering aside, elected John Quincy Adams, then thirty-six years old, for the long term, and allowed Pickering to enter the Senate only as junior senator to a man more than twenty years younger than himself, whose father had but three years before dismissed Pickering abruptly and without explanation from his Cabinet. Neither of the senators owned a temper or character likely to allay strife. The feud between them was bitter and life-long. From the moment of their appearance in the Senate they took opposite sides. Pickering held with Tracy, Griswold, and all the extreme Federalists that the treaty was void, and that the admission of Louisiana as a State without the separate consent of each State in the Union was a rupture of the compact, which broke the tie and left each State free to act independently of the rest. His colleague was as decided in favor of the Louisiana purchase as Pickering and Tracy were opposed to it; but he too agreed that the treaty was outside of the Constitution, and he urged the Senate to take this view. He believed that even Connecticut would approve of admitting Louisiana if the Southern majority had the courage to try the experiment. “I firmly believe, if an amendment to the Constitution, amply sufficient for the accomplishment of everything for which we have contracted, shall be proposed, as I think it ought, it will be adopted by the legislature of every State in the Union.” This was in effect the view which Jefferson had pressed upon his Cabinet and friends.