carried to the Supreme Court of the United States, and there finally settled. And, therefore, I say that in all cases that come within the purview of the judicial department of the Government, the laws of the United States, as administered by the Courts, and their decisions, bind the citizens of the States in every part of the land. But, gentlemen, there are an immense class of cases constantly arising where no opportunity can ever be presented to a Court to pass upon them, which were never intended to be passed upon by a Court, which are cases of collision between the executive department of the General Government and the State government in matters, as I expressed it to you before, affecting the public domain, or the State or its citizens as a body politic. As laid down by the expounders of the Constitution of the United States, that instrument is one to which the States are parties, as well as the people of the United States and people of each State. Suppose a case of this kind. It is not a case likely to arise; but every case may arise, as we have been sadly admonished by the events of the last few months. Suppose we had a President in the executive chair at Washington who was a citizen of the State of Massachusetts, and greatly interested in the prosperity of the commerce of the City of Boston; and suppose that, being a wicked man (for wicked men have been sometimes elected to offices in this and every country), he had conceived the iniquitous design of ruining the commerce of New York, for the purpose of benefiting the commerce of the City of Boston; and suppose, in the prosecution of that wicked design, without the pretense of authority to do so under the Constitution of the United States, without a pretense that Congress had passed any law authorizing him to do anything of the kind, he should station a fleet of vessels, by orders to the commander of his squadron, off the harbor of New York, and should say, from this day forward the commerce of the port of New York is hermetically closed, and the commerce which has formerly gone to New York must go to Boston. Is the State of New York, under a condition of things of that kind, to submit to the closing of her commerce, to her ruin and destruction? Can she get before the Courts for redress against such an infringement of the Constitution by the President? How is she to get there? She cannot go to the Supreme Court of the United States, for in the Courts of the United States there is no form of jurisdiction by which the question can be brought before the Courts by any possibility whatever; and New York is a sovereign and independent State, and, so far as she has not conceded jurisdiction to the United States by the Constitution, has a right to exercise every sovereign and independent power that she has. _There_ is a case, therefore, in which the Courts of law can afford no redress,--in which the Constitution has erected no common arbiter between the General