"[51]
It is a tedious task to have to expose the misstatements, both of fact
and of principle, which have occupied so much attention, but it is
rendered necessary by the extent to which they have been imposed upon
the acceptance of the public, through reckless assertion and confident
and incessant repetition.
"'I remember,' says Mr. Webster, 'to have heard Chief-Justice
Marshall ask counsel, who was insisting upon the authority of an
act of legislation, _if he thought an act of legislation could
create or destroy a fact, or change the truth of history_?
"Would it alter the fact," said he, "if a Legislature should
solemnly enact that Mr. Hume never wrote the History of
England?" A Legislature may alter the law,' continues Mr.
Webster, 'but no power can reverse a fact.' Hence, if the
Convention of 1787 had expressly declared that the Constitution
was [to be] ordained by 'the people of the United States _in the
aggregate_,' or by the people of America as one nation, this
would not have destroyed the fact that it was ratified by each
State for itself, and that each State was bound only by 'its own
voluntary act.'" (Bledsoe.)
But the Convention, as we have seen, said no such thing. No such
community as "the people of the United States in the aggregate" is known
to it, or ever acted on it. It was ordained, established, and ratified
by the people of the several States; and no theories or assertions of a
later generation can change or conceal this fixed fact, as it stands
revealed in the light of contemporaneous records.
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