1. _Resolved._ That the several States composing the United States of America are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general Government; but that, by a compact under the style and title of a Constitution for the United States, and of amendments thereto, they constituted a general Government for special purposes--delegated to that Government certain definite powers, reserving, each State to itself, the residuary mass of right to their own self-government; and that whensoever the general Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force; that to this compact each State acceded as a State, and is an integral party, its co-States forming, as to itself, the other party: that the Government created by this compact was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself; since that would have made its discretion, and not the Constitution, the measure of its powers; but, that, as in all other cases of compact among powers having no common judge, each party has an equal right to judge for itself, as well of infractions as of the mode and measure of redress. Not only was Jefferson perfectly consistent in repeating almost word for word in this Resolution the doctrine of natural rights and State rights already enunciated in 1776, but the last lines foretold the theory he was to defend against Marshall during his presidency. By denying that the parties to the Federal compact had a common judge, he refused in advance to consider the Supreme Court as the guardian, interpreter, and defender of the Constitution. This principle once asserted, Jefferson endeavored to prove that the Sedition Bill, the Alien Bill and other measures adopted by Congress at the instigation of the Federalists constituted an infringement of State rights, since they did not deal with matters specifically reserved to Congress and since it was provided that "the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States are reserved to the States respectively or to the people." This was at the same time an attempt to prove the unconstitutionality of the recent legislation and an endeavor to define more exactly the powers of the Federal Government. The Eighth Resolution, the longest, proposed the establishment of a committee of correspondence to communicate the resolutions to the different legislatures and enunciated the doctrine of nullification, namely that the State had the right to consider as nonexistent such laws as might be passed in defiance of the Constitution. Naturally the Law of Sedition and the Alien Bill came under that category.