the written constitution. The government has veiled the older and grander proportions of the State. Even Mr. Motley, in his letter to the London Times, at the beginning of our civil strife, committed the strange error of asserting "that the constitution of 1787 made. us a nation." It did, it could do, no such thing. It was the nation that made the constitution. In the words of the preamble it asserts its imperial parentage.

By thus looking at the government rather than the State, so many of our most sagacious public men were betrayed into the admission that prior to the adoption of the constitution, the States were sovereign. This was the view of Mr. Jefferson, and was even conceded by Mr. Webster. From this view the doctrine of secession followed as a logical conclusion.

For when were the States thus severally possessed of sovereign power? Not during the colonial period, for then, as they themselves repeatedly asserted, they were mere dependencies of the British Crown. Not when Independence was first declared, for that declaration was a joint act, the assertion of a collective sovereignty. Not as separate States, but as an organized political unity, they proceeded to raise armies, to carry on war, to conclude treaties. Never were they recognized by any foreign power as endowed with other than collective sovereignty. The sovereignty wrested from the British Crown passed to the United States, nor by any act, nor by any declaration, nor by any pretence whatever, did any one of those States ever claim a separate and individual sovereignty. What though in the din of arms they became so oblivious of their nationality as to accept the erroneous expression of it in the Articles of Confederation, shall an error of statement

vitiate an historic fact? Let the whole dangerous doctrine of original State sovereignty be forever dismissed from the public mind. Let the words of an illustrious South Carolinian statesman be forever engraved on all our hearts: "The separate independence and individual sovereignty of the several States were never thought of by the enlightened band of patriots who framed the Declaration."

Our political system will never be secure till this notion of original State sovereignty has been exploded. No military triumphs can accomplish this. To be conquered is not to be convinced. But a few days ago, in a New York paper, the defiant declaration was put forth: "The South accepts the result in respect to its present practical application, but that acceptance does not imply any abandonment in thought of the principle upon which the secession movement was founded." It is but charity to think that by very many these views are honestly maintained, and that soon as the fearful ravages of war have been forgotten, they may reassert their malignant and destructive sway over southern sentiment; and there is no way in which these conclusions can be logically met but by ceasing to regard the nation as compounded of separate sovereignties. What though we claim that in adopting the federal constitution, the States renounced forever their separate sovereignty, and ceded it to the central power? party competent to do, is competent to undo, and though sacred faith may be broken, and solemn pledges may be violated by such a course, yet what prevents that some miserable plea that the terms of the agree ment have been broken by the other members, shall be held by one member to justify withdrawing from it?

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Do we say that the very terms of the agreement imply that it shall be perpetual? Is not every treaty of alliance between nations in its terms perpetual? Was not the Holy Alliance meant to be perpetual? But what barrier have its solemn stipulations proved to the unscrupulous ambition of Bismarck?

The denial of original State sovereignty is not the denial of State rights. The rights of the States, within their appropriate sphere are sacred and inviolable as the rights of the federal government. Our political system is exposed to no greater peril than is involved in the tendency to centralization of power. But with explicit division of powers there is no division of sovereignty. The State entrusts its functions to a double set of agents, but does not abdicate its indivisible and inalienable supremacy. Between the federal and State functions no issue of subordination can arise.

Mr. Calhoun, misled by mere external resemblances, fancied that he saw in the adjustment of our Federal and State authority, a reproduction of the English system of checks and balances, and he would have rendered it more efficient by a dual executive, and by substituting concurrent for numerical majorities. It is incomprehensible how so acute a mind should have so wholly misconceived the genius of our system. The British constitution, which bears in all its features the marks of the long conflict of classes out of which it sprung, and which, like the proud Keep of Windsor, to which it has been compared, is a majestic monument of feudal civilization, seeks in the balance of Three Estates a safeguard against despotism. English liberties have grown from this antagonism. But in our system such antagonism can have no place. Our Federal and State

governments do not represent rival classes or antagonistic interests. Our interests are homogeneous and organic. The Federal and State governments are not centripital and centrifugal forces; they are happily combined like the double motion of the earth on its axis and in its orbit.

Keeping in mind this distinction between the State and government, we can easily estimate the value of that aphorism so often uttered, "that the Federal tie is weak because it is artificial." Is not every form of government artificial? Can the term be applied to the clauses of our Federal Constitution with any more propriety than to the Reform Bill or the Bill of Rights, or even to Magna Charta? Or, in what sense are the interpretations of the Constitution by the Supreme Court, which ultimately fix its meaning, any more artificial than the long series of Pretorian Edicts which stamped its peculiar character on Roman Law? If the objection has any force, it applies to every form of government that has ever existed since the legislation of Solon, or the Laws of the Ten Tables. Sir James Mackintosh gained great reputation once for saying that "Constitutions are not made, but grow." The only meaning of such a maxim is the simple and obvious meaning that constitutions must be framed in accordance with anterior facts. They are weak, not because they are made, but because they are unwisely or unjustly made.

A Federal system is more artificial than other systems only because it is the highest refinement of human policy. It is more artificial only in the sense that all consummate achievements of art, of literature, of science, are more artificial; only in the sense that

every matured product of intelligence and reason is more artificial than the untutored instinct of the savage. That a body politic, thus formed, should be less compact than barbarian or feudal monarchies, would imply that civilization itself is anarchy.

The Federal systems of ancient Greece were weak, because their starting point was the separate sovereignty of cities; ours is strong because the collective sovereignty of the American people is the broad basis on which it rests. It might indeed be questioned whether the term "federal" is strictly applicable to a system that so radically departs from all former types. In the more exact phrase of Mr. Phillimore, we may call it a "composite state." It is, in every essential aspect, a new experiment, the logical working out of the most advanced political ideas of modern times.

The strange craft that shot so suddenly the other day into the harbor of St. Johns, when the frightened watchman fled his post announcing that a sinking ship was coming in, did not more truly embody an original idea, than do our institutions. Like that watchman, most of those abroad who, five years ago, had their gaze for the first time fixed upon us by the breaking out of the civil conflict, thought they saw a sinking ship. Like that little craft which has safely ploughed its way across the ocean, and now floats beside the frowning batteries of England, proclaiming, wherever she bears the Star Spangled Banner, that a new age of naval warfare has come, the Republic decried and denounced, with prophets of evil predicting that she was fit only for smooth seas and summer gales, across a darker and a stormier sea has held her victorious course, and today, in the pride of unbroken strength, and in the