US Presidency
1853

Recurring to these principles, which constitute the organic basis of union, we perceive that vast as are the functions and the duties of the Federal Government, vested in or intrusted to its three great departments the legislative, executive, and judicial yet the substantive power, the popular force, and the large capacities for social and material development exist in the respective States, which, all being of themselves well constituted republics, as they preceded so they alone are capable of maintaining and perpetuating the American Union. The Federal Government has its appropriate line of action in the specific and limited powers conferred on it by the Constitution, chiefly as to those things in which the States have a common interest in their relations to one another and to foreign governments, while the great mass of interests which belong to cultivated men the ordinary business of life, the springs of industry, all the diversified personal and domestic affairs of society rest securely upon the general reserved powers of the people of the several States.