Nothing is more natural to men in office, than to look with peculiar deference towards that authority to which they owe their official existence.

There is no position which depends on clearer principles than that every act of a delegated authority, contrary to the commission under which it is exercised, is void. No legislative act, therefore, contrary to the Constitution, can be valid.

Common interest may always be reckoned upon as the surest bond of sympathy.

The people alone have an incontestable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to institute government and to reform, alter, or totally change the same when their protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness require it.

As to Taxes, they are evidently inseparable from Government. It is impossible without them to pay the debts of the nation, to protect it from foreign danger, or to secure individuals from lawless violence and rapine.

Nothing can be more evident, than that an exclusive power of regulating elections for the National Government, in the hands of the State Legislatures, would leave the existence of the Union entirely at their mercy . . . . It is to little purpose to say that a neglect or omission of this kind [not letting the feds have elections], would be unlikely to take place. The constitutional possibility of the thing, without an equivalent for the risk, is an unanswerable objection.

Establish that a Government may decline a provision for its debts, though able to make it, and you overthrow all public morality, you unhinge all the principles that must preserve the limits of free constitutions.