Such a right is at once met and nullified by a right to refuse. They are equal and contrary rights. As we are upon a question of verbal criticism, and it is so treated in the Enquirer, we may look for information to our dictionaries. To instruct, in its primitive or most appropriate meaning, is simply to _teach_—and instruction is the act of _teaching_, or _information_. It is true that Johnson gives, as a more remote meaning, “to inform authoritatively.” Certainly, the Legislature may instruct, may teach, may inform a Senator, and whenever they do so it will be with no small degree of authority from the relation in which they stand to each other; but the great question is, not whether this would be an impertinent or improper interference on the part of the Legislature, but whether the Senator is bound, by his official oath or duty, implicitly to obey such instructions; whether he violates a duty he ought to observe, or usurps a power which does not belong to him, if he declines to submit to these directions, if he cannot receive the lesson thus taught, or adopt the information thus imparted to him. Does {406} the spirit of our Constitution (for clearly in terms it does not) intend to make a Senator of the _United States_ a mere passive instrument or agent in the hands of a _State Legislature_. Is he required by any legal or moral duty or obligation, to surrender into the hands of any man or body of men, his honest judgment and conscientious convictions of right? To act on _their_ dictation and _his own_ responsibility; responsible to his country for the consequences of his vote, and to his own conscience and his God for the disregard of his oath of office, which bound him to support that Constitution which his instructions may call upon him to violate, _as he conscientiously believes_. It will be a miserable apology for him to say, that he has done this because he was so ordered by a body of men, who may have thought or cared very little about it, and may hold a different opinion the next year without remorse or responsibility. But if he cannot obey, must he save his conscience by resigning his seat? This is the most unsound and untenable of all the grounds assumed in this discussion. If it is the _official duty_ of the Senator to do and perform the will of his constituents, or rather of those who gave him his office, then he violates or evades that duty by resigning; and he may, in this way, not only abandon his duty, but as effectually defeat the will and intention of his Legislature as by actually voting against it. To return to Mr. King—how does he propose or expect that this check of legislative instructions is to act upon the Senator? What is the nature of the obligation he considers to rest upon the Senator to obey them? He does not pretend that there is any power in the Legislature to enforce their instructions or cause them to be respected.