tinction in the first fifty years of the history of the Republic.1 Nevertheless it often happens that a small State produces a firstrate man, whom the country ought to have in its highest places, as President, or as Speaker of the House of Representatives, but who is passed over because the Federal system gives great weight to the voice of a State, and because State sentiment is so strong that the voters of a State which has a large and perhaps a doubtful vote to cast in national elections, prefer an inferior man in whom they are directly interested to a superior one who is a stranger.

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 re-establishing 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

1 Webster may be fairly counted to Massachusetts, as he settled there in early life, and sat for many years as senator from it.

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, one is 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 XXX

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 the following:

proper,

and are

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. So when the new Germanic Empire, which is really a Federation, was established in 1870, Bavaria and Wurtemberg could not have been brought under a national government save by a Federal scheme. Similar suggestions, as every one knows, have been made for re-settling the relations of Ireland to Great Britain, and of the self-governing British colonies to the United Kingdom. There are causes and conditions which dispose nations living under a loosely compacted government, or under a number of almost independent governments, to form a closer union in a Federal form. There are other causes and conditions which dispose the subjects of one government, or sections of these subjects,

to desire to make their governmental union less close by substituting a system of a Federal character. In both sets of cases, the centripetal or centrifugal forces spring from the local position, the history, the sentiments, the economic needs of those among whom the problem arises; and that which is good for one people or political body is not necessarily good for another. Federalism may be an equally legitimate resource where it is adopted for the sake of tightening or 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 it 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 selff-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, while some States, like those of New England, possessed an admirably complete system of local government, others, such as Virginia, the old champion of State sovereignty, were imperfectly provided with it. Nevertheless, through both sets of arguments there runs the general principle, applicable in every part and branch of government, that, where other things are equal, the more power is given to the units which compose the nation, be they large or small, and the less to the nation as a whole and to its central authority, so much the fuller will be the liberties and so much greater the energy of the individuals who compose the people. This principle, though it had not been then formulated in the way men formulate it now, was heartily embraced by the Americans. Perhaps it was because they agreed in taking it as an axiom that they seldom referred to it in the subsequent controversies regarding State rights. These controversies proceeded on the basis of the Constitution as a law rather than on considerations of general political theory. A European reader of the history of the first seventy years of the United States is surprised how little is said, through the interminable discussions regarding the relation of the Federal government to the States, on the respective advantages of centralization or localization of powers as a matter of historical experience and general expediency.

Three further benefits to be expected from a Federal system may be mentioned, benefits which seem to have been unnoticed or little regarded by those who established it in America.

6. Federalism enables a people to try experiments in legisla