The resolutions also arraigned the government for the sedition and other acts punishing crimes, saying “that the General Government may place any act they think proper on the list of crimes and punish it themselves.” It declared “that these and successive acts of the same character may tend to drive these States into revolution and blood.” It will be noticed that the resolutions make no claim of a right of secession. The use of the words revolution and blood implied that resistance to the laws would be war. The resolutions also arraigned the government for the Alien Law, calling it a tyranny, and asking the States to concur with them in considering that the acts of the General Government were so unconstitutional that they amount to an undisguised declaration “that the compact is not meant to be the measure of the powers of the General Government, but that it will proceed in the exercise over these States of all powers whatsoever”; and they ask the States that they will concur in declaring these laws void and of no force, and in requesting their repeal. The resolutions did not call upon the people or State of Kentucky to treat these denounced laws as null and void, but asked the other States to join them in getting Congress to repeal them. For some reasons wholly incomprehensible, these nullifying resolutions of Kentucky and those of Virginia have been seized upon and referred to by late writers in the mistaken belief that they were the same, and are alike declaratory of the right of a State, as an independent sovereign power, to treat as null and void any United States law it deems to be so, and with apparently the belief that they were concurred in to a great extent at the time of their adoption.[69] [69] See vol. i., Bryce’s _American Commonwealth_, p. 328.