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uncertainty as to the occasions on which the rule was to apply; and as all other objects were to remain exclusively subject to the authority of the States within their respective territorial limits, the operation of the rule was carefully limited to those occasions.

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The highly complex character of a system in which the duties and rights of the citizen are thus governed by distinct sovereignties, would seem to render the administration of the central power surrounded as it is by jealous and vigilant local governments an exceedingly difficult and delicate task. Its situation is without an exact parallel in any other country in the world. But it possesses the means which no government of a purely federal character has ever enjoyed, of an exact determination by itself of its own powers; because every conflict between its authority and the authority of a State may be made a judicial question, and as such is to be solved by the judicial department of the nation. This peculiar device has enabled the government of the United States to act successfully and safely. Without it, each State must have been left to determine for itself the boundaries between its own powers and those of the Union; and thus there might have been as many different determinations on the same question as the number of the States. At the same time, this very diversity of interpretation would have deprived the general government of all power to enforce, or even to have, an interpretation of its own. Such a confused and chaotic condition had marked the entire history of the Con

federation. It was terminated with the existence of that political system, by the establishment of the rule which provides for the supremacy of the Constitution of the United States, and by making one final arbiter of all questions arising under it.

By means of this skilful arrangement, a government, in which the singular condition is found of separate duties prescribed to the citizen by two distinct sovereignties, has operated with success. That success is to be measured not wholly, or chiefly, by the diversities of opinion on constitutional questions that may from time to time prevail; nor by the means, aside from the Constitution, that may sometimes have been thought of for counteracting its declared interpretation; but by the practical efficiency with which the powers of the Union have operated, and the general readiness to acquiesce in the limitations given to those powers by the department in which their construction is vested. This general acquiescence has steadily increased, from the period when the government was founded until the present day; and it has now come to be well understood, that there is no alternative to take the place of a ready submission to the national will, as expressed by or under the Constitution interpreted by the proper national organ, excepting a resort to methods that lie wholly without the Constitution, and that would completely subvert the principles on which it was founded. For while it is true that the people of each State constitute the sovereign power by which the rights and duties of its

inhabitants not involved in the Constitution of the United States are to be exclusively governed, it is equally true that they do not constitute the whole of the sovereign power which governs those relations of its inhabitants that are committed to the national legislature. The framers of the Constitution resorted to an enactment of that instrument by the people of the United States, and employed language which speaks in their name, for the express purpose, among other things, of bringing into action a national authority, on certain subjects. The organs of the general government, therefore, are not the agents of the separate will of the people of each State, for certain specified purposes, as its State government is the agent of their separate will for all other purposes; but they are the agents of the will of a collective people, of which the inhabitants of a State are only a part. That the will of the whole should not be defeated by the will of a part, was the purpose of the supremacy assigned to the Constitution of the United States; and that the rights and. liberties of each part, not subject to the will of the whole, should not be invaded, was the purpose of the careful enumeration of the objects to which that supremacy was to extend.

In this supremacy of the national government within its proper sphere, and in the means which were devised for giving it practical efficiency, we are to look for the chief cause that has given to our system a capacity of great territorial extension. It is a system in which a few relations of the inhabitants

of distinct States are confided to the care of a central authority; while, for the purpose of securing the uniform operation of certain principles of justice and equality throughout the land, particular restraints are imposed on the power of the States. With these exceptions, the several States remain free to pursue such systems of legislation as in their own judgment will best promote the interest and welfare of their inhabitants. Such a division of the political powers of society admits of the union of far greater numbers of people and communities, than could be provided for by a single representative government, or by any other system than a vigorous despotism. Many of the wisest of the statesmen of that period, as we now know, entertained serious doubts whether the country embraced by the thirteen original States would not be too large for the successful operation of a republican government, having even so few objects committed to it as were proposed to be given to the Constitution of the United States. If those objects had been made to embrace all the relations of social life, it is extremely probable that the original limits of the Union would have far exceeded the capacities of a republican and representative government, even if the first difficulties arising from the differences of manners, institutions, and local laws could have been

overcome.

But these very differences may be, and in fact have been, made a means of vast territorial expansion, by the aid of a principle which has been placed at the

foundation of the American Union. Let a number of communities be united under a system which embraces the national relations of their inhabitants, and commits a limited number of the objects of legislation to the central organs of a national will, leaving their local and domestic concerns to separate and local authority, and the growth of such a nation may be limited only by its position on the surface of the earth. The ordinary obstacles arising from distance, and the physical features of the country, may be at once overcome for a large part of the purposes of government, by this division of its authority. The wants and interests of civilized life, modified into almost endless varieties, by climate, by geographical position, by national descent, by occupation, by hereditary customs, and by the accidental relations of different races, may in such a state of things be governed by legislation capable of exact adaptation to the facts with which it has to deal. In this way, separate States under the republican form may be multiplied indefinitely.

Now what is required in order to make such a multiplication of distinct States at the same time a national growth, is the operation of some principle that will preserve their national relations to the control of a central authority. This is effected by the supremacy of the Constitution of the United States, against which no separate State power can be exerted. This supremacy secures the republican form of government, the same general principles and maxims of justice, and the same limitations between

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