an absurdity. The court was established, among other purposes, to
protect the people from unconstitutional legislation; and if Congress,
in the extreme of madness, should attempt thus to invade the
sovereignty of a State, it would be within the power, and would be the
duty of the court, to check the aggression by declaring such law void.
The court have, on more than one occasion, asserted the right of
transit as a consequence of the guarantees of the Constitution, but it
would require much ingenuity to torture the protection of a traveller
or sojourner into an assertion of a right to become resident and
introduce property in contravention of the fundamental law of the
State, or of a citizen to hold property within a State in violation of
its constitution and its policy. The error of the proposition was so
palpable that, like the truth of an axiom, it could not be rendered
plainer by demonstration.

It is not within the scope of human foresight to see the
embarrassments which may arise in the execution of any policy. When it
was declared that soil, climate, and unrestrained migration should be
left to fix the _status_ of the territories, and institutions of the
States to be formed out of them, no one probably anticipated that
companies would be incorporated to transport colonists into a
territory with a view to decide its political condition. Congress, as
he believed, yielding too far to the popular idea, had surrendered its
right of revision and thus had recently lost its power to restrain
improper legislation in the territories. From these joint causes had
arisen the unhappy strife in Kansas, which at one time threatened to
terminate in civil war. The Government had been denounced for the
employment of United States troops. Very briefly he would state the
case.