CHAPTER XXXIV NATURE OF THE AMERICAN STATE THE American State is a peculiar organism, unlike anything in modern Europe or in the ancient world. The only parallel is to be found in the cantons of modern Switzerland. Let me attempt to sketch the American States as separate political entities, forgetting for the moment that they are also parts of a federation. Virginia The older colonies had different historical origins. and North Carolina were unlike Massachusetts and Connecticut; New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland different from both; while in recent times the stream of European immigration has filled some States with Irishmen, others with Germans, others with Scandinavians, and has left most of the Southern States wholly untouched. Nevertheless, the form of government is in its main outlines, and to a large extent even in its actual working, the same in all these forty-five Republics, and the differences, instructive as they are, relate to points of secondary consequence. The States fall naturally into five groups: The New England States - Massachusetts, Connecticut, The Southern, or old slave States Virginia, West Virginia (separated from Virginia during the war), North Caro 1 Delaware and Maryland were slave States, but did not secede, and are in some respects to be classed rather with the Middle than with the Southern group, as indeed are West Virginia and Missouri, perhaps even Tennessee and Kentucky. 2 Ohio and Indiana are becoming rather Middle than Western, but many people would still class them among Western States. lina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Texas. The North-western States Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Utah. The Pacific States - California, Nevada, Oregon, Washing ton. Each of these groups has something distinctive in the character of its inhabitants, which is reflected, though more faintly now than formerly, in the character of its government and politics. New England is the old home of Puritanism, the traces whereof, though waning under the influence of Irish and French Canadian immigration, are by no means yet extinct. The Southern States will long retain the imprint of slavery, not merely in the presence of a host of Negroes, but in the degradation of the poor white population, and in certain attributes, laudable as well as regrettable, of the ruling class. The North-west is the land of hopefulness, and consequently of bold experiments in legislation: its rural inhabitants have the honesty and narrow-mindedness of agriculturists. The Pacific West, or rather California and Nevada, for Oregon and Washington belong in character to the Upper Mississippi or North-western group, tinges the energy and sanguine good nature of the Westerns with a speculative recklessness natural to mining communities, where great fortunes have rapidly grown and vanished, and into which elements have been suddenly swept together from every part of the world, as a Rocky Mountain rainstorm fills the bottom of a valley with sand and pebbles from all the surrounding heights. As the dissimilarity of population and of external conditions seems to make for a diversity of constitutional and political arrangements between the States, so also does the large measure of legal independence which each of them enjoys under the Federal Constitution. No State can, as a commonwealth, politically deal with or act upon any other State. No diplomatic relations can exist nor treaties be made between States, no coercion can be exercised by one upon another. And although the government of the Union can act on a State, it rarely does act, and then only in certain strictly limited directions, which do not touch the inner political life of the commonwealth. Let us pass on to consider the circumstances which work for uniformity among the States, and work more powerfully as time goes on. He who looks at a map of the Union will be struck by the fact that so many of the boundary lines of the States are straight lines. Those lines tell the same tale as the geometrical plans of cities like St. Petersburg or Washington, where every street runs at the same angle to every other. The States are not natural growths. Their boundaries are for the most part not natural boundaries fixed by mountain ranges, nor even historical boundaries due to a series of events, but purely artificial boundaries, determined by an authority which carved the National territory into strips of convenient size, as a building company lays out its suburban lots. Of the States subsequent to the original thirteen, California is the only one with a genuine natural boundary, finding it in the chain of the Sierra Nevada on the east and the Pacific Ocean on the west. No one of these later States can be regarded as a naturally developed political organism. They are trees planted by the forester, not self-sown with the help of the seedscattering wind. This absence of physical lines of demarcation has tended and must tend to prevent the growth of local distinctions. Nature herself seems to have designed the Mississippi basin, as she has designed the unbroken levels of Russia, to be the dwelling-place of one people. Each State makes its own Constitution; that is, the people agree on their form of government for themselves, with no interference from the other States or from the Union. This form is subject to one condition only: it must be republican.1 But in each State the people who make the Constitution have lately come from other States, where they have lived under 1 The case of Kansas immediately before the War of Secession, and the cases of the seceding States, which were not readmitted after the war till they had accepted the constitutional amendments forbidding slavery and protecting the freedmen, are quite exceptional. |