gated by the nation, and can be overridden by its will. The nation acts directly by its own officers, not merely on the communities, but upon every single citizen; and the nation, because it is independent of these communities, would continue to exist were they all to disappear. Examples of such minor communities may be found in the departments of modern France and the counties of modern England.

The American Federal Republic corresponds to neither of these two forms, but may be said to stand between them. Its central or national government is not a mere league, for it does not wholly depend on the component communities which we call the States. It is itself a commonwealth as well as a union of commonwealths, because it claims directly the obedience of every citizen, and acts immediately upon him through its courts and executive officers. Still less are the minor communities, the States, mere subdivisions of the Union, mere creatures of the national government, like the counties of England or the departments of France. They have over their citizens an authority which is their own, and not delegated by the central government. They have not been called into being by that government. They existed before it. They could exist without it. The American States are all inside the Union, and have all become subordinate to it. Yet the Union is more than an aggregate of States, and the States are more than parts of the Union. It might be destroyed, and they, adding a few further attributes of power to those they now possess, might survive as independent self-governing communities.

This is the cause of that immense complexity which startles and at first bewilders the foreign student of American institutions, a complexity which makes American history and current American politics so difficult to the European who finds in them phenomena to which his own experience supplies no parallel. There are two loyalties, two patriotisms; and the lesser patriotism is jealous of the greater. There are two governments, covering the same ground, commanding, with equally direct authority, the obedience of the same citizen. A due comprehension of this double organization is the first and indispensable step to the comprehension of American institutions:

as the elaborate devices whereby the two systems of government are kept from clashing are the most curious subject of study which those institutions present. How did so complex a system arise, and what influences have molded it into its. present form? This is a question which cannot be answered without a few words of historical retrospect.

CHAPTER II

THE ORIGIN OF THE CONSTITUTION

When in the reign of George III. troubles arose between England and her North American colonists, there existed along the eastern coast of the Atlantic thirteen little communities, all owning allegiance to the British Crown. But practically each colony was a self-governing commonwealth, left to manage its own affairs with scarcely any interference from home. Each had its legislature, its own statutes adding to or modifying the English common law, its local corporate life and traditions.

When the oppressive measures of the home government roused the colonies, they naturally sought to organize their resistance in common. Singly they would have been an easy prey, for it was long doubtful whether even in combination they could make head against regular armies. A congress of delegates from nine colonies, held at New York in 1765, was followed by another at Philadelphia in 1774, at which twelve were represented, which called itself Continental (for the name American had not yet become established), and spoke in the name of "the good people of these colonies," the first assertion of a sort of national unity among the English of America. This congress, in which from 1775 onward all the colonies were represented, was a merely revolutionary body, called into existence by the war with the mother country. But in 1776 it declared the independence of the Colonies, and in 1777 it gave itself a new legal character by framing the "Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union," whereby the thirteen States (as they now called themselves) entered into a "firm league of

friendship" with one another, offensive and defensive, while declaring that "each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right which is not by this Confederation expressly delegated to the United States in Congress assembled."

This Confederation, which was not ratified by all the States till 1781, was rather a league than a national government, for it possessed no central authority except an assembly in which every State, the largest and the smallest alike, had one vote, and this authority had no jurisdiction over the individual citizens. The plan corresponded to the wishes of the colonists, but it worked badly, and was, in fact, as Washington said, no better than anarchy. Congress was impotent, and commanded respect as little as obedience.

Sad experience of their internal difficulties, and of the contempt with which foreign governments treated them, at last produced a feeling that some firmer and closer union of the States was needed. A convention of delegates from five States met at Annapolis in Maryland, in 1786, to discuss methods of enabling Congress to regulate commerce. It drew up a report which condemned the existing state of things, declared that reforms were necessary, and suggested a further general con vention in the following year to consider the condition of the Union and the needed amendments in its Constitution.

Such a convention was summoned and met at Philadelphia. on the fourteenth of May, 1787, became competent to proceed to business on the twenty-fifth of May, when seven States were represented, and chose George Washington to preside. Delegates attended from every State but Rhode Island, and these delegates were the leading men of the country, influential in their several States, and now filled with a sense of the need for comprehensive reforms. The majority ultimately resolved to prepare a wholly new Constitution, to be considered and ratified neither by Congress nor by the state legislatures, but by the peoples of the several States.

The convention had not only to create de novo, on the most slender basis of preëxisting national institutions, a national government for a widely scattered people, but they had in doing

so to respect the fears and jealousies and apparently irreconcilable interests of thirteen separate commonwealths, to all of whose governments it was necessary to leave a sphere of action wide enough to satisfy a deep-rooted local sentiment, yet not so wide as to imperil national unity.

It was even a disputable point whether the colonists were already a nation or only the raw material out of which a nation might be formed. There were elements of unity, there were also elements of diversity. But while diversities and jealousies made union difficult, two dangers were absent which have beset the framers of constitutions for other nations. There were no reactionary conspirators to be feared, for every one prized liberty and equality. There were no questions between classes, no animosities against rank and wealth, for rank and wealth did not exist.

It was inevitable under such circumstances that the Constitution, while aiming at the establishment of a durable central power, should pay great regard to the existing centrifugal forces. It was, and remains what its authors styled it, eminently an instrument of compromises; it is perhaps the most successful instance in history of what a judicious spirit of compromise may effect.

The draft Constitution was submitted, as its last article provided, to conventions of the several States (i. e., bodies specially chosen by the people for the purpose) for ratification. It was to come into effect as soon as nine States had ratified, and eventually it was ratified by all the States.

There was a struggle everywhere over the adoption of the Constitution, a struggle which gave birth to the two great parties that for many years divided the American people. The chief source of hostility was the belief that a strong central government endangered both the rights of the States and the liberties of the individual citizen. Freedom, it was declared, would perish at the hands of her own children. Consolidation. (for the word centralization had not yet been invented) would extinguish the state governments and the local institutions they protected. But the fear of foreign interference, the sense of weakness, both at sea and on land, against the military mon

archies of Europe, was constantly before the mind of American statesmen, and made them anxious to secure at all hazards a national government capable of raising an army and navy, and of speaking with authority on behalf of the new Republic.

Several of the conventions which ratified the Constitution accompanied their acceptance with an earnest recommendation of various amendments to it, amendments designed to meet the fears of those who thought that it encroached too far upon the liberties of the people. Some of these were adopted, immediately after the original instrument had come into force, by the method it prescribes, viz., a two-thirds majority in Congress and a majority in three fourths of the States. They are the amendments of 1791, ten in number, and they constitute what the Americans, following a venerable English precedent, call a Bill or Declaration of Rights.

The Constitution of 1789 deserves the veneration with which Americans have been accustomed to regard it. It is true that many criticisms have been passed upon its arrangement, upon its omissions, upon the artificial character of some of the institutions it creates. And whatever success it has attained must be in large measure ascribed to the political genius, ripened by long experience, of the Anglo-American race, by whom it has been worked, and who might have managed to work even a worse drawn instrument. Yet, after all deductions, it ranks above every other written constitution for the intrinsic excellence of its scheme, its adaptation to the circumstances of the people, the simplicity, brevity, and precision of its language, its judicious mixture of definiteness in principle with elasticity in details.

The American Constitution is no exception to the rule that everything which has power to win the obedience and respect of men must have its roots deep in the past, and that the more slowly every institution has grown, so much the more enduring is it likely to prove. There is little in that Const:tution that is absolutely new. There is much that is as old as Magna Charta. The men of the Convention had the experience of the English Constitution. That Constitution was very different then from what it is now. The powers and functions of the