it is and is admitted to be a real _Constitution of Government_, it carries with it certain incidents which belong to it as such, and which are inseparable from its nature. Of these incidents, essential properties or characteristics of the _social compact_, the first in order are that the parties to it have not a moral right to withdraw from it at discretion, or to construe at discretion the powers of the Government created by it, but are bound to remain parties to it, and to acquiesce in the acts of the Government created by it, excepting in those extreme cases which justify open rebellion. These are principles universally acknowledged. No one has ever questioned them; no one has ever undertaken to maintain that the members of a political society have a right to withdraw from it at discretion, or that the laws of the land are not in ordinary cases binding on the citizens. The principle is equally true under all forms of government, as the Vice-President himself very correctly intimates, when he states that the relation between the General Government and the States is the same with that between the States and their own Governments, or in general between all Governments and the societies in which they are established. Such are the principles which, by _universal acknowledgment_, determine the relations between Governments and the political societies in which they exist. When therefore the Vice-President fully and formally admits that the two Houses of Congress, the President, and the executive and judicial officers acting under them are a _real Government_;--that the instrument by virtue of which they hold their powers is a real _Constitution_ or _social compact_, he admits,--if he choose at the same time to describe them as an agency,--that they are an agency which the parties that constituted it, whether States or individuals, have not a right to revoke at discretion; an agency which construes its own powers, and has a right to enforce its own construction of them upon its principals, excepting in the extreme cases which justify a _violent resistance to the law_: he admits that nullification is either wholly unjustifiable or justifiable only as _resistance_: he admits, in a word, that nullification, if it have any proper and intelligible meaning at all, is only another name for _rebellion_. This is, in fact, the real truth of the whole business.