For why declare that things shall not be done, which there is
no power to do?"[83] Could language be more clear or more complete in
vindication of the principles laid down in this work? Mr. Hamilton
declares, in effect, that the grants to the Federal Government in the
Constitution are not surrenders, but delegations of power by the people
of the States; that sovereignty remains intact where it was before; and
that the delegations of power were strictly limited to those expressly
granted--in this, merely anticipating the tenth amendment, afterward
adopted.
Finally, in the concluding article of the "Federalist," he bears
emphatic testimony to the same principles, in the remark that "every
Constitution for the United States must inevitably consist of a great
variety of particulars, in which _thirteen independent States_ are to be
accommodated in their interests or opinions of interest.... Hence the
necessity of molding and arranging all the particulars, which are to
compose the whole, in such a manner as to satisfy _all the parties_ to
the compact."[84] There is no intimation here, or anywhere else, of the
existence of any such idea as that of the aggregated people of one great
consolidated state. It is an incidental enunciation of the same truth
soon afterward asserted by Madison in the Virginia Convention--that the
people who ordained and established the Constitution were "not the
people as composing one great body, but the people as composing thirteen
sovereignties".
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