Mr. EDMUNDS. The question submitted by my friendfrom Maine, reduced to a simple point, is: at what period of time have we a right to assume that i. people become a State. under this fundamental condition which we impose upon them, and what is the evidence that they have so become a State? And he inquires whether the entry and representation by Senators in this body will be evidence which will bind the people to the performance of this condition, and to the complete creation and erection of that State. As I have said before in the course of this debate, the people of any State, whatever may be the limitations in their government, whether as to slavery or anything else, may choose to become dissolved and not to exercise the political functions with which they are endowed, whether they are old or new; and when they cease to exercise those functions, to hold elections, to send Sens&Reps, and to exercise the other acts which are necessary in political communities, of course as an organized political community that State becomes dissolved, and there is no power in the Government at all, because in the nature of things there cannot be, to compel those people to exercise those functions. Now, if we admit this State with this fundamental condition, which becomes a part of the act of admission, then any action which her agents and representatives may take under it is primafacie evidence that they are exercising political power under the charter of incorporation which we have chosen to grant them. If it turns out afterward that the agents who have thus assumed to represent the State and to exercise those functions with which we have invested them are repudiated by their people, their stockholders, to use an apt illustration, and the stockholders choose to dissolve the corporation, then of course the representative functions of those agents must cease, and we shall only be in the condition that we often are for a short time of having had representatives in this body who, it finally turned out, had no right to be here. We have frequently expelled men, we have frequently rejected the claims of men who have sat as members of this body for a long time upon the ground that they had no lawful authority to sit here at all. Therefore, if these Senators should come in and thus primafacie give vital action to the functions of this State under this law, and their action should be repudiated, (and it would be no new thing if it should be,) and the State should choose to dissolve itself rather than to work under the charter of liberty which we give it, the not new thing will happen that for a short time ".will have sat in this body who it turned out had no right to seats. That is all the difficulty there is about it, and it is the same difficulty that might have existed, allow me to tell my friendfrom Maine, under almost every one of these previous acts in some form or other, because the final acts of admis.sion of many of these States have authorized the Sens&Reps to come in immediately, although there were conditions imposed upon their admission which were not to be submitted to the people of the State. Take, if you please, the State of Michigan, a State which is much better represented in this body, according to my judgment, than it used to be. Its Sens&Reps had been elected irregularly by the"people without the sanction of law at all, without the form or color or pretext of law for it, in opposition to law; and the State came here. its constitution, with its Senators and members elected. We passed an act on the 15th of June, 1836, admitting that State into the Union with certain changed boundaries. We sent it back to the people of that State upon the sole question of boundaries alone, that they should assent to those boundaries and nothing else. Then we proceeded, after having sent it back upon that one point, to enact further: “That nothing in this act contained, or in the admission of the said State into the Union as one of the U.S.A. upon an equal footing with the original States in all respectswhatever, shall be so construed, or understood as to go; confer upon the legislature, or other authorities of State the said of Michigan, any authority or right to interfere with the sale by the U.S., and under their authority, of the vacant and unsold lands within the limits of the said State, but that the subject of the public lands, and the interests which may be iven to the said State therein, shall be regulated by uture action between Congress, on the part of the U.S., and the said State, or the authorities thereof. And the said State of Michigan shall in no case, and under no pretense whatsoever, impose any tax, assessment, or, imposition of upon any any description of the lands of the U.S. within its y limits.”