AddressesLittle, Brown,, 1906 - 155 pages |
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Popular passages
Page 24 - We admit, as all must admit, that the powers of the government are limited, and that its limits are not to be transcended. But we think the sound construction of the constitution must allow to the national legislature that discretion, with respect to the means by which the powers it confers are to be carried into execution, which will enable that body to perform the high duties assigned to it, in the manner most beneficial to the people.
Page 13 - Thus I consent, sir, to this Constitution because I expect no better, and because I am not sure that it is not the best. The opinions I have had of its errors I sacrifice to the public good.
Page 27 - As men whose intentions require no concealment, generally employ the words which most directly and aptly express the ideas they intend to convey, the enlightened patriots who framed our Constitution, and the people who adopted it, must be understood to have employed words in their natural sense, and to have intended what they have said.
Page 82 - Constitution intended to endure for ages to come, and, consequently, to be adapted to the various crises of human affairs.
Page 9 - People, instead of We, the States? States are the characteristics, and the soul of a confederation. If the states be not the agents of this compact, it must be one great consolidated national government of the people of all the states.
Page 25 - If the States may tax one instrument employed by the government in the execution of its powers, they may tax any and every other instrument. They may tax the mail; they may tax the mint; they may tax patent rights; they may tax the papers of the custom-house ; they may tax judicial process; they may tax all the means employed by the government, to an excess which would defeat all the ends of government.
Page 147 - I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored, the nearer the Union will be — "the Union as it was.
Page 97 - It is a familiar rule that a thing may be within the letter of the statute and yet not within the statute, because not within its spirit nor within the intention of its makers.
Page 27 - The constitution confers absolutely on the government of the union the powers of making war, and of making treaties ; consequently, that government possesses the power of acquiring territory, either by conquest or by treaty.
Page 25 - That the power to tax involves the power to destroy; that the power to destroy may defeat and render useless the power to create; that there is a plain repugnance in conferring on one government a power to control the constitutional measures of another, which other, with respect to those very means, is declared to be supreme over that which exerts the control, are propositions not to be denied.