instead of preserving it in its true dimensions. It is into _this_ Union, that is the Union of the Federal Constitution, that you are to admit or refuse to admit. You can admit into no other. You cannot make the Union, as to the new States, what it is not as to the old; for then it is not _this_ Union that you open for the entrance of a new party. If you make it enter into a new and additional compact is it any longer the same Union?... But it is a State which you are to admit. What is a _State_ in the sense of the Constitution? It is not a State in general, but a State as you find it in the Constitution.... Ask the Constitution. It shows you {86} what it means by a State by reference to the parties to it. It must be such a State as Massachusetts, Virginia, and the other members of the American Confederacy--a State with full sovereignty except as the Constitution restricts it. The whole amount of the argument on the other side is, that you may refuse to admit a new State, and that, therefore, if you admit, you may prescribe the terms. The answer to that argument is, that even if you can refuse, you can prescribe no terms which are inconsistent with the act you are to do. You can prescribe no conditions which, if carried into effect, would make the new State less a sovereign State than, under the Union as it stands, it would be. You can prescribe no terms which will make the compact of Union between it and the original States essentially different from that compact among the original States. You may admit or refuse to admit, but if you admit, you must admit a State in the sense of the Constitution--a State with all such sovereignty as belongs to the original parties; and it must be into _this_ Union that you are to admit it, not into a Union of your own dictating, formed out of the existing Union by qualifications and new compacts, altering its character and effect, and making it fall short of its protecting energy in reference to the new State, whilst it requires an energy of another sort--the energy of restraint and destruction."