had only half a million free inhabitants, less than the present population of Baltimore. Massachusetts had 450,000, Pennsylvania 400,000, New York 300,000; while Georgia, Rhode Island, and Delaware had (even counting slaves) less than 200,000 between them. These were communities to which the expression "local self-government" might be applied, for, although the population was scattered, the numbers were small enough for the citizens to have a personal knowledge of their leading men, and a personal interest (especially as a large proportion were land-owners) in the economy and prudence with which common affairs were managed. Now, however, when of the nearly fifty States twenty-nine have more than a million inhabitants, and six have more than three millions, the newer States, being, moreover, larger in area than most of the older ones, the stake of each citizen is relatively smaller, and generally too small to sustain his activity in politics, and the party chiefs of the State are known to him only by the newspapers or by their occasional visits on a stumping tour.

All that can be claimed for the Federal system under this head of the argument is that it provides the machinery for a better control of the taxes raised and expended in a given region of the country, and a better oversight of the public works undertaken there than would be possible were everything left to the Central Government. As regards the educative effect of numerous and frequent elections, it will be shown in a later chapter that elections in America are too many and come too frequently. Overtaxing the attention of the citizen and frittering away his interest, they leave him at the mercy of knots of selfish adventurers.

The utility of the State system in localizing disorders or discontents, and the opportunities it affords for trying easily and safely experiments which ought to be tried in legislation and administration, constitute benefits to be set off against

the risk, referred to in the last preceding chapters, that evils may continue in a district, may work injustice to a minority and invite imitation by other States, which the wholesome stringency of the Central Government might have suppressed.

A more unqualified approval may be given to the division of legislative powers. The existence of the State Legislatures relieves Congress of a burden too heavy for its shoulders; for although it has far less foreign policy to discuss than the Parliaments of England, France, or Italy, and although the separation of the executive from the legislative department gives it less responsibility for the ordinary conduct of the Administration than devolves on those chambers, it could not possibly, were its competence as large as theirs, deal with the multiform and increasing demands of the different parts of the Union. There is great diversity in the material conditions of different parts of the country, and at present the people, particularly in the West, are eager to have their difficulties handled, their economic and social needs satisfied, by the State and the law. It would be extremely difficult for any central legislature to pass measures suited to these dissimilar and varying conditions. How little Congress could satisfy them appears by the very imperfect success with which it cultivates the field of legislation to which it is now limited.

These merits of Federal system of government which I have enumerated are the counterpart and consequences of that limitation of the central authority whose dangers were indicated in the last chapter. They are, if one may reverse the French phrase, the qualities of Federalism's defects. The problem which all federalized nations have to solve is how to secure an efficient central government and preserve National unity, while allowing free scope for the diversities, and free play to the authorities, of the members of the feder

ation. It is, to adopt that favorite astronomical metaphor which no American panegyrist of the Constitution omits, to keep the centrifugal and centripetal forces in equilibrium, so that neither the planet States shall fly off into space, nor the sun of the Central Government draw them into its consuming fires. The characteristic merit of the American Constitution lies in the method by which it has solved this problem. It has given the National Government a direct authority over all citizens, irrespective of the State Governments, and has therefore been able safely to leave wide powers in the hands of those Governments. And by placing the Constitution above both the National and the State Governments, it has referred the arbitrament of disputes between them to an independent body, charged with the interpretation of the Constitution, a body which is to be deemed not so much a third authority in the Government as the living voice of the Constitution, the unfolder of the mind of the people whose will stands expressed in that supreme instrument.

The application of these two principles, unknown to, or at any rate little used by, any previous federation, has contributed more than any thing else to the stability of the American system, and to the reverence which its citizens feel for it, a reverence which is the best security for its permanence. Yet even these devices would not have succeeded but for the presence of a mass of moral and material influences, stronger than any political devices, which have maintained the equilibrium of centrifugal and centripetal forces. On the one hand, there has been the love of local independence and selfgovernment; on the other, the sense of community in blood, in language, in habits and ideas, a common pride in the National history and the National flag.

Quid leges sine moribus? The student of institutions, as well as the lawyer, is apt to overrate the effect of mechanical

contrivances in politics. I admit that in America they have had one excellent result; they have formed a legal habit in the mind of the Nation. But the true value of a political contrivance resides not in its ingenuity, but in its adaptation to the temper and circumstances of the people for whom it is designed, in its power of using, fostering and giving a legal form to those forces of sentiment and interest which it finds in being. So it has been with the American system. Just as the passions which the question of slavery evoked strained the Federal fabric, disclosing unforeseen weaknesses, so the love of the Union, the sense of the material and social benefits involved in its preservation, appeared in unexpected strength, and manned with zealous defenders the ramparts of the sovereign Constitution. It is this need of determining the suitability of the machinery for the workmen and its probable influence upon them, as well as the capacity of the workmen for using and their willingness to use the machinery, which makes it so difficult to predict the operation of a political contrivance, or, when it has succeeded in one country, to advise its imitation in another. The growing strength of the National Government in the United States is largely due to sentimental forces that were weak a century ago, and to a development of internal communications which was then undreamt of. And the devices which we admire in the Constitution might prove unworkable among a people less patriotic and self-reliant, less law-loving and law-abiding, than are the English of America.

THE COOPERATION OF ENGLISH-SPEAKING

PEOPLES1

ARTHUR JAMES BALFOUR

MR. PRESIDENT, GENTLEMEN OF THE CHAMBER: The noble words to which we have just listened struck, I am well convinced, a sympathetic chord in the heart of every one in your audience, but I don't think that in all the multitude gathered here to-day there was one to whom they went more home than to myself. Mr. President, I have had as thè dream of my life a hope that before I died the union between the English-speaking, freedom-loving branches of the human race should be drawn far closer than in the past, and that all temporary causes of difference which may ever have separated two great peoples would be seen in its true and just proportion, and that we should all realize, on whatever side of the Atlantic fortune had place us, that the things wherein we have differed in the past sink into absolute insignificance compared with those vital agreements which at all times, but never at such a time as the present, unite us in one great spiritual whole.

My friend Mr. Choate, in a speech that he delivered yesterday at the City Hall, told his audience that as Ambassador to Great Britain he had been in close official relations with me through many years, and that during all of these years I had stood solid - I think that was his phrase - for American friendship. That is strictly and absolutely true, and the feelings that I have this great opportunity of

1 Speech made before the New York Chamber of Commerce, May 12, 1917, by the head of the British Mission to the United States.