[144] marque and reprisal, regulating coinage, establishing and controlling the postal service—indeed, nearly all the so-called “characteristic powers of sovereignty” exercised by the federal government under the existing Constitution, except the regulation of commerce, and of levying and collecting its revenues directly, instead of through the interposition of the state authorities. The exercise of these first-named powers was prohibited to the states under the old compact, “without the consent of the United States in Congress assembled,” but no one has claimed that the confederation had thereby acquired sovereignty. Entirely in accord with these truths are the arguments of Madison in the Federalist, to show that the great principles of the Constitution are substantially the same as those of the Articles of Confederation. He says:
I ask, What are these principles? Do they require that, in the establishment of the Constitution, the States should be regarded as distinct and independent sovereigns? They are so regarded by the Constitution proposed. ... Do these principles, in fine, require that the powers of the General Government should be limited, and that, beyond this limit, the States should be left in possession of their sovereignty and independence? We have seen that, in the new Government as in the old, the general powers are limited; and that the States, in all unenumerated cases, are left in the enjoyment of their sovereign and independent jurisdiction. The truth is that the great principles of the Constitution proposed by the Convention may be considered less as absolutely new, than as the expansion of principles which are found in the Articles of Confederation.1In the papers immediately following, he establishes this position in detail by an analysis of the principle powers delegated to the federal government, showing that the spirit of the original instructions to the convention had been followed in revising “the Federal Constitution” and rendering it “adequate to the exigencies of government and the preservation of the Union.”2 The present Union owes its very existence to the dissolution, by separate secession of its members, of the former Union, which, as we have thus seen, as to its organic principles, rested upon precisely the same foundation. The right to withdraw from the association results, in either case, from the same principles—principles which, I think, have been established on an impregnable basis of history, reason, law, and precedent. It is not contended that this right should be resorted to for insufficient cause, or, as the writer already quoted on the law of partnership says,
