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The domestic concerns of the people were not,
in general, to be acted on by it. The security of the power, of managing
them by domestic legislature, is one of the great objects of the Union.
The Union is a means, not an end. By requiring greater sacrifices
of domestic power, the end is sacrificed to the means. Suppose the
surrender of all, or nearly all, the domestic powers of legislation were
required; the means would there have swallowed up the end.
The argument that the compact may be enforced, shows that the Federal
predicament changed. The power of the Union not only acts on persons or
citizens, but on the faculty of the government, and restrains it in a
way which the Constitution nowhere authorizes. This new obligation takes
away a right which is expressly "reserved to the people or the States,"
since it is nowhere granted to the government of the Union. You cannot
do indirectly what you cannot do directly. It is said that this Union
is competent to make compacts.


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