1855-56 the National executive played a sorry part; and even in the resolute hands of President Grant it was hampered in the re-establishment of order in the reconquered Southern States by the rights which the Federal Constitution secured to those States. The only general conclusion on this point which can be drawn from history is that while the central government is likely to find less and less difficulty in enforcing its will against a State or disobedient subjects, because the prestige of its success in the Civil War has strengthened it and the facilities of communication make the raising and moving of troops more easy, nevertheless recalcitrant States, or groups of States, still enjoy certain advantages for resistance, advantages due partly to their legal position, partly to their local sentiment, which rebels might not have in unified countries like England, France, or Italy.

III. Everybody knows that it was the Federal system, and the doctrine of State sovereignty grounded thereon, and not expressly excluded, though certainly not recognized, by the Constitution, which led to the secession of 1861, and gave European powers a plausible ground for recognizing the insurgent minority as belligerents. Nothing seems now less probable than another secession, not merely because the supposed legal basis for it has been abandoned, and because the advantages of continued union are more obvious than ever before, but because the precedent of the victory won by the North will discourage like attempts in the future. This is so strongly felt that it has not even been thought worth while to add to the Constitution an amendment negativing the right to secede. IV. The combination of States into groups was a familiar feature of politics before the war. South Carolina and the Gulf States constituted one such, and the most energetic, group; the New England States frequently acted as another, especially during the war of 1812. At present, though there are several sets of States whose common interests lead their representatives in Congress to act together, it is no longer the fashion for States to combine in an official way through their State organizations, and their doing so would excite reprehension. It is easier, safer, and more effective to act through the great National parties. Any considerable State interest (such as that of the silver-miners or cattle-men, or Protectionist

manufacturers) can generally compel a party to conciliate it by threatening to forsake the party if neglected. Political action runs less in State channels than it did formerly, and the only really threatening form which the combined action of States could take, that of using for a common disloyal purpose State revenues and the machinery of State governments, has become, since the failure of secession, most improbable.

V. The want of uniformity in private law and methods of administration is an evil which different minds will judge by different standards. Some may think it a positive benefit to secure a variety which is interesting in itself and makes possible the trying of experiments from which the whole country may profit. In the United States the possible diversity of laws is immense. Subject to a few prohibitions contained in the Constitution, each State can play whatever tricks it pleases with the law of family relations, of inheritance, of contracts, of torts, of crimes. But the actual diversity is not great, for all the States, save Louisiana, have taken the English common and statute law of 1776 as their point of departure, and have adhered to its main principles.

I have left to the last the gravest reproach which Europeans have been wont to bring against Federalism in America. They attributed to it the origin, or at least the virulence, of the great. struggle over slavery which tried the Constitution so severely. That struggle created parties which, though they had adherents everywhere, no doubt tended more and more to become identified with States, controlling the State organizations and bending the State governments to their service. It gave tremendous importance to legal questions arising out of the differences between the law of the Slave States and the Free States, questions which the Constitution had either evaded or not foreseen. It shook the credit of the Supreme Court by making the judicial decision of those questions appear due to partiality to the Slave States. It disposed the extreme men on both sides to hate the Federal Union which bound them in the same body with their antagonists. It laid hold of the doctrine of State rights and State sovereignty as entitling a commonwealth which deemed itself aggrieved to shake off allegiance to the National government. Thus at last it brought about secession and the great Civil War. Even when the war was over, the

dregs of the poison continued to haunt and vex the system, and bred fresh disorders in it. The constitutional duty of reestablishing the State governments of the conquered States on the one hand, and on the other hand the practical danger of doing so while their people remained disaffected, produced the military governments, the "carpet bag" governments, the Ku Klux Klan outrages, the gift of suffrage to a Negro population unfit for such a privilege, yet apparently capable of being protected in no other way. All these mischiefs, it has often been argued, are the results of the Federal structure of the government, which carried in its bosom the seeds of its own destruction, seeds sure to ripen so soon as there arose a question that stirred men deeply.

It may be answered not merely that the National government has survived this struggle and emerged from it stronger than before, but also that Federalism did not produce the struggle, but only gave to it the particular form of a series of legal controversies over the Federal pact followed by a war of States against the Union. Where such vast economic interests were involved, and such hot passions roused, there must anyhow have been a conflict, and it may well be that a conflict raging within the vitals of a centralized government would have proved no less terrible and would have left as many noxious sequelae behind.

In blaming either the conduct of a person or the plan and scheme of a government for evils which have actually followed, men are apt to overlook those other evils, perhaps as great, which might have flowed from different conduct or some other plan. All that can fairly be concluded from the history of the American Union is that Federalism is obliged by the law of its nature to leave in the hands of States powers whose exercise may give to political controversy a peculiarly dangerous form, may impede the assertion of National authority, may even, when long-continued exasperation has suspended or destroyed the feeling of a common patriotism, threaten National unity itself. Against this danger is to be set the fact that the looser structure of a Federal government and the scope it gives for diversities of legislation in different parts of a country may avert sources of discord, or prevent local discord from growing into a contest of national magnitude.

CHAPTER XXIX

MERITS OF THE FEDERAL SYSTEM

I Do not propose to discuss in this chapter the advantages of Federalism in general, for to do this we should have to wander off to other times and countries, to talk of Achaia and the Hanseatic League and the Swiss Confederation. I shall comment on those merits only which the experience of the American Union illustrates.

There are two distinct lines of argument by which their Federal system was recommended to the framers of the Constitution, and upon which it is still held forth for imitation to other countries. These lines have been so generally confounded that it is well to present them in a precise form.

The first set of arguments point to Federalism proper, and are the following:

1. That Federalism furnishes the means of uniting commonwealths into one nation under one National government without extinguishing their separate administrations, legislatures, and local patriotisms. As the Americans of 1787 would probably have preferred complete State independence to the fusion of their States into a unified government, Federalism was the only resource. Federalism is an equally legitimate resource whether it is adopted for the sake of tightening or for the sake of loosening a pre-existing bond.

2. That Federalism supplies the best means of developing a new and vast country. It permits an expansion whose extent, and whose rate and manner of progress, cannot be foreseen to proceed with more variety of methods, more adaptation of laws and administration to the circumstances of each part of the territory, and altogether in a more truly natural and spontaneous way, than can be expected under a centralized government, which is disposed to apply its settled system through all its

dominions. Thus the special needs of a new region are met by the inhabitants in the way they find best: its special evils are cured by special remedies, perhaps more drastic than an old country demands, perhaps more lax than an old country would tolerate; while at the same time the spirit of self-reliance among those who build up these new communities is stimulated and respected.

3. That Federalism prevents the rise of a despotic central government, absorbing other powers, and menacing the private liberties of the citizen. This may now seem to have been an idle fear, so far as America was concerned. It was, however, a very real fear among the great-grandfathers of the present Americans, and nearly led to the rejection even of so undespotic an instrument as the Federal Constitution of 1789. Congress (or the President, as the case may be) is still sometimes described as a tyrant by the party which does not control it, simply because it is a central government: and the States are represented as bulwarks against its encroachments.

The second set of arguments relate to and recommend not so much Federalism as local self-government. I state them briefly because they are familiar.

4. Self-government stimulates the interest of people in the affairs of their neighbourhood, sustains local political life, educates the citizen in his daily round of civic duty, teaches him that perpetual vigilance and the sacrifice of his own time and labour are the price that must be paid for individual liberty and collective prosperity.

5. Self-government secures the good administration of local affairs by giving the inhabitants of each locality due means of overseeing the conduct of their business.

That these two sets of grounds are distinct appears from the fact that the sort of local interest which local self-government evokes is quite a different thing from the interest men feel in the affairs of a large body like an American State. So, too, the control over its own affairs of a township, or even a small county, where everybody can know what is going on, is quite different from the control exercisable over the affairs of a commonwealth with a million of people. Local self-government may exist in a unified country like England, and may be wanting in a Federal country like Germany. And in America itself,