In the report Mr. Calhoun took the ground that the freedom of the mails was a necessary part of the freedom of the press, and argued that, as Congress was prohibited by the first amendment to the Constitution from passing any law abridging the freedom of the press, so Congress possessed no power to pass any law excluding mail matter from the mails on account of the character of its contents or authorizing such matter to be withheld from the addressees. Mr. Calhoun's conclusion was that only the "States" could make such laws as would effect these things. He proposed in his bill, therefore, that no deputy postmaster in any "State," Territory, or district of the Union should knowingly receive and put into the mail any printed or written paper or pictorial representation touching the subject of slavery, addressed to a person or a post-office within any "State," Territory, or district in which the circulation of such papers and representations was forbidden by the local laws; that the officers and agents of the Post-Office Department should co-operate with the local officials in preventing the circulation of such papers and representations where their circulation was prohibited by the local laws; that the matter so detained from transmission by a post-office official should be burned, after one month's notice, if the person depositing the same should not claim it within that period; and that the post-office officials who should violate these duties should not be {274} protected by the laws of the United States against the jurisdiction of the local law and government. [Sidenote: Clay's criticism of Calhoun's proposition.] Mr. Clay immediately pointed out the fatal weaknesses of this proposition. He argued that it attributed to Congress either the power to adopt the laws of the "States" upon subjects in regard to which Congress itself had not the power to legislate, or the power to pass laws in execution of laws which it had no power to make. The argument was unanswerable, and the conclusion was unavoidable that if Congress could not itself pass a law excluding the Abolition papers and documents from the mail, or forbidding their delivery to the addressees, it could not enact Mr. Calhoun's proposition. After four months of deliberation the Senate rejected the proposed bill by a vote of twenty-five to nineteen. Mr. Calhoun thus lost the aid of the general Government in his contest with the Abolitionists over the use of the mails chiefly through his exaggerated "States' rights" doctrine. [Sidenote: The act of Congress protecting the Abolition documents in the mails.]