Presented in this crude, unsophisticated and unqualified shape, the system of the Vice-President becomes almost ludicrous; but when we recollect the respectability of the quarter from which it proceeds, and the serious aspect which the practice upon it is assuming at the South, a painful feeling irresistibly predominates. Did Mr. Calhoun, when he was entering on these forbidden speculations, recollect the impressive language in which the Father of his country, forty years ago, pointed out their danger? 'It is of infinite moment, that you should properly estimate the value of your national Union to your collective and individual happiness; that you should cherish a cordial, habitual and immoveable attachment to it; accustoming yourselves to think and speak of it as the palladium of your political safety and prosperity; _discountenancing whatever may suggest even a suspicion that it can in any event he abandoned_; and indignantly frowning upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest, or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together its various parts.' Is it _discountenancing whatever may suggest even a suspicion that the Union can in any event be abandoned_, to affirm explicitly and without qualification, that every State has a right at its own discretion to secede from the Union? Is it _frowning indignantly upon the first dawning of every attempt to enfeeble the sacred ties which link together the United States_, to maintain that these links are a mere cobweb, which any one of the States has a right to break through or shake off at its own discretion? Is this a fit and proper lesson to come from the high places of the Federal Government, from the second in rank of the citizens who have been selected from the whole country, as the immediate executors of the great charter of the Union? We agree with Mr. Calhoun, that of the two heresies to which he alludes, the greater includes and supposes the less:--that it would be inconsistent for any one, who admits the right of nullifying at once, by secession, the Constitution and all the laws, to deny the right of nullifying one; but we utterly deny that either can be reconciled with the letter or spirit of the Constitution. The social compact,--like the contract of marriage,--is one in which the parties take each other for better or worse, for sickness or health, for life and for death. It is one from which they have no right to retire at discretion. They can have no right, as States or individuals, to avoid, either wholly or in part, the obligations of this compact, and the laws made under it, for the plain and unanswerable reason, that this compact and the laws made under it are the rule which determines for them what is right, and that opposition to the rule of right must of course be wrong. Extreme cases may undoubtedly occur, in which the obligation may, either wholly or in part, be innocently avoided; but they cannot, from the nature of the