You may sweat and reduce it to a thing of skin and
bone, and then place the ominous skeleton beside the ruddy and healthful
members of the Union, that it may have leisure to mourn the lamentable
difference between itself and its companions, to brood over its
disastrous promotion, and to seek in justifiable discontent an
opportunity for separation, and insurrection, and rebellion. What may
you not do by dexterity and perseverance with this terrific power? You
may give to a new State, in the form of terms which it cannot
refuse, (as I shall show you hereafter,) a statute book of a
thousand volumes--providing not for ordinary cases only, but even for
possibilities; you may lay the yoke, no matter whether light or heavy,
upon the necks of the latest posterity; you may send this searching
power into every hamlet for centuries to come, by laws enacted in the
spirit of prophecy, and regulating all those dear relations of domestic
concern which belong to local legislation, and which even local
legislation touches with a delicate and sparing hand.
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