THE AMERICAN SYSTEM OF GOVERN

MENT

The State Governments

CHAPTER I

NATURE OF THE STATE

HE American State is a peculiar organism, unlike anything

parallel is to be found in the cantons of the Switzerland of our own day.

There are forty-five States in the American Union, varying in size from Texas, with an area of 265,780 square miles, to Rhode Island, with an area of 1,250 square miles. The largest State is much larger than either France or the Germanic Empire, while the smallest is smaller than Warwickshire or Corsica.

The older colonies had different historical origins. Virginia 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, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine.

The Middle States-New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Ohio, Indiana.

The Southern States-Virginia, West Virginia (separated from Virginia during the Civil War), North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Texas.

The Northwestern States-Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, North Dakota, South Daokta, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Utah.

The Pacific States-California, Nevada, Oregon, Washington.

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.

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.

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 selfsown with the help of the seed-scattering 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. It was the obvious course for the newer States to copy the organizations of the older States, especially as these agreed with certain familiar features of the Federal Constitution. Hence the outlines, and even the phrases of the elder constitutions reappear in those of the more recently formed States.

Nowhere is population in such constant movement as in America. In some of the newer States only one fourth or one fifth of the inhabitants are natives of the United States. Many of the townsfolk, not a few even of the farmers, have been till lately citizens of some other State, and will, perhaps, soon move on farther west. These Western States are like a chain of lakes through which there flows a stream which mingles the waters of the higher with those of the lower. In such a constant flux of population local peculiarities are not readily developed, or if they have grown up when the district was still isolated, they disappear as the country becomes filled.

Still more important is the influence of railway communication, of newspapers, of the telegraph. A Greek city like Samos or Mitylene, holding her own island, preserved a distinctive character in spite of commercial intercourse and the sway of Athens. A Swiss canton like Uri or Appenzell, entrenched behind its mountain ramparts, remains, even now, under the strengthened central government of the Swiss nation, unlike its

neighbors of the lower country. But an American State traversed by great trunk lines of railway, and depending on the markets of the Atlantic cities and of Europe for the sale of its grain, cattle, bacon, and minerals, is attached by a hundred always tightening ties to other States, and touched by their weal or woe as nearly as by what befalls within its own limits. The leading newspapers are read over a vast area. The inhabitants of each State know every morning the events of yesterday over the whole Union.

Finally, the political parties are the same in all the States. The tenets of each party are in the main the same everywhere, their methods the same, their leaders the same, although of course a prominent man enjoys especial influence in his own State. Hence, State politics are largely swayed by forces and motives external to the particular State, and common to the whole country, or to great sections of it; and the growth of local parties, the emergence of local issues and development of local political schemes, are correspondingly restrained.

These considerations explain why the States, notwithstanding the original diversities between some of them, and the wide scope for political divergence which they all enjoy under the Federal Constitution, are so much less dissimilar and less peculiar than might have been expected. Each of the States has its

own

Constitution.

Executive, consisting of a governor and various other officials.

Legislature of two Houses.

System of local government in counties, cities, townships, and school districts.

System of State and local taxation.

Debts, which it may repudiate at its own pleasure.

Body of private law, including the whole law of real and personal property, of contracts, of torts, and of family relations.

Courts, from which no appeal lies (except in cases touching Federal legislation or the Federal Constitution) to any Federal court.

System of procedure, civil and criminal.

Citizenship, which may admit persons (e.g., recent immigrants) to be citizens at times, or on conditions, wholly different from those prescribed by other States.

Three points deserve to be noted as illustrating what these attributes include.

I. A man gains active citizenship of the United States (ie., a share in the government of the Union) only by becoming a citizen of some particular State. Being such citizen, he is forthwith entitled to the national franchise. That is to say, voting power in the State carries voting power in Federal elections, and however lax a State may be in its grant of such power (e.g., to foreigners just landed or to persons convicted of crime), these State voters will have the right of voting in congressional and presidential elections. Under the present naturalization laws a foreigner must have resided in the United States for five years, and for one year in the State or Territory where he seeks admission to United States citizenship, and must declare two years before he is admitted that he renounces allegiance to any foreign prince or state. Naturalization makes him a citizen not only of the United States, but of the State or Territory where he is admitted, but does not necessarily confer the electoral franchise, for that depends on State laws. In more than a third of the States the electoral franchise is now enjoyed by persons not naturalized as United States. citizens. The only restriction on the States in this matter is that of the fourteenth and fifteenth Constitutional amendments. They were intended to secure equal treatment to the negroes, and incidentally they declare the protection given to all citizens of the United States.

II. The power of a State over all communities within its limits is absolute. It may grant or refuse local government as it pleases. The population of the city of Providence is more than one third of that of the State of Rhode Island, the popu lation of New York city about one half that of the State of New York. But the State might in either case extinguish the municipality, and govern the city by a single State commis