This episode, threatening as it was for a time, drew in its train results the most happy, revealing with unprecedented vividness to most, both the original nature of the Constitution as not a compact, and also the might which national sentiment had attained since the War of 1812. The doctrine of state rights was seen to have gradually lost, over the greater part of the country, all its old vitality. Nearly every State Legislature condemned the South Carolina pretensions, Democrats as hearty in this as Whigs. Jackson's proclamation against them--impressive and unanswerable--ran thus: "The Constitution of the United States forms a government, not a league; and whether it be formed by compact between the States, or in any other manner, its character is the same . . . . I consider the power to annul a law of the United States incompatible with the existence of the Union, contradicted expressly by the letter of the Constitution, and destructive of the great object for which it was formed. . . . Our Constitution does not contain the absurdity of giving power to make laws, and another power to resist them. To say that any State may at pleasure secede from the Union is to say that the United States are not a nation." [Illustration: Small room with a desk, fireplace, and bookshelf.] Calhoun's Library and Office. The congressional debates which the nullification question evoked, among the ablest in our parliamentary history, held the like high national tenor. Calhoun's idea, though advocated by him with consummate skill, was shown to be wholly chimerical. The doughty South Carolinian, from this moment a waning force in American politics, was supported by Hayne almost alone, the arguments of both melting into air before Webster's masterful handling of constitutional history and law. Not questioning the right of revolution, admitting the general government to be one of "strictly limited," even of "enumerated, specified, and particularized powers," the Massachusetts orator made it convincingly apparent that the Calhoun programme could lead to nothing but anarchy. It was seen that general and state governments emanate from the people with equal immediacy, and that the language of the clause, "the Constitution and the laws of the United States made in pursuance thereof" are "the supreme law of the land, anything in the constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding," means precisely what it says. To this language little attention had apparently been paid till this time. CHAPTER V. MINOR PUBLIC QUESTIONS OF JACKSON'S "REIGN" [1828]