In other times, when other doctrines were fashionable in South Carolina, we were told by one of her distinguished statesmen of a very different _radical_ error, which was _lurking at the bottom_ of a doctrine which he then thought it his duty to oppose. 'The States, as political bodies,'--said Mr. McDuffie in his well-known pamphlet, _The Trio_, published about ten years ago,--'the States, as political bodies, have no original inherent rights. That they have such rights, is a false, dangerous and anti-republican assumption, which _lurks at the bottom_ of all the reasoning in favor of State rights.'--Is there not room to apprehend that the error, which really lurks at the bottom in both these cases, is not precisely the one alluded to by either of these distinguished statesmen, but another which was also signalised by Mr. McDuffie on the same occasion and in the same pamphlet? 'Ambitious men of inferior talents, finding that they have no hope to be distinguished in the councils of the national Government, naturally wish to increase the power and consequence of the State Governments, the theatres in which they expect to acquire distinction. It is not, therefore, a regard for the rights of the people, and a real apprehension that those rights are in danger, that have caused so much to be said on the subject of prostrate State sovereignties and consolidated empire. It is the ambition of that class of politicians who expect to figure only in the State Councils, and of those States who are too proud to acknowledge any superior.' This quotation was too provokingly apposite to be omitted; but we frankly own that the question preceding it must, in reference to the present case, be answered in the negative. The leading nullifiers, though sufficiently ambitious, are not men 'of inferior talents, who can have no hope of distinguishing themselves in the councils of the national Government.' They possess talents of a high order, and had already reached the most elevated stations in the National Government, before their judgments, previously sound and acute, had given way to the strange delusion which has now got possession of them. It is therefore necessary to look for the motives of their present proceedings in other quarters. Perhaps we may find them pretty satisfactorily accounted for, in the following passage of the same publication by Mr. McDuffie. 'He must have read the lessons of history to little purpose, who does not perceive that the people of particular States are liable to fall occasionally into a dangerous and morbid excitement upon particular subjects; and that, under this excitement, they will impel their rulers into the adoption of measures in their tendency destructive to the Union.'