vation of the Union." This was the Convention that erected the two famous political idols in America: the Constitution of 1789 and the Union formed under it, and entitled itself to the extravagant adulation of three generations as the wisest and best of men.

This adulation is simply absurd. The language in the call of the Convention was singularly confused. The men who composed it were common flesh and blood, very ignorant, very much embarrassed, many of them unlettered, and many educated just to that point where men are silly, visionary, dogmatic and impracticable.

Hildreth, the American historian, has made a very just remark, which describes the cause of the unpopularity of his own compositions. He says: "In dealing with our revolutionary annals, a great difficulty had to be encountered in the mythic, heroic character above, beyond, often wholly apart from the truth of history, with which, in the popular idea, the fathers and founders of our American Republic have been invested. American literature having been mainly of the rhetorical cast, and the Revolution and the old times of the forefathers forming standing subjects for periodical eulogies, in which every new orator strives to outvie his predecessors, the true history of those times, in spite of ample records, illustrated by the labors of many diligent and conscientious inquirers, has yet been almost obliterated by declamations which confound all discrimination and just appreciation in one confused glare of patriotic eulogium."*

We find in 1866, even after the experience of the war, President Johnson declaring that the authours of the Constitution were divinely inspired; that "they needed and obtained a wisdom superiour to experience." This is silly extravagance, if not worse. We shall see that there was one element of originality and of great virtue in the Constitution; but apart from this, the sober student of history, looking over three generations of fierce political conflict in America, must be struck by the enormous defects and omissions of an instrument that has shared so much the undue admiration of mankind.

In another work the authour has enumerated in the paragraphs quoted below the defective texts of the Constitution:

"It is impossible to resist the thought, that the framers of the Constitution were so much occupied with the controversy of jealousy between the large and the small States that they overlooked many great and obvious questions of government, which have since been fearfully developed in the political history of America. Beyond the results and compromises of that jealousy, the debates and the work of the Convention show one of the most wonderful blanks that has, perhaps, ever occurred in the political inventions of civilized mankind. They left behind them a list of imperfections in political prescience, a want of provision for the exigencies of their country, such as has seldom been known in the history of mankind."

"A system of negro servitude existed in some of the States. It was an object of no solicitude in the Convention. The only references in the Constitution to it are to be found in a provision in relation to the rendition of fugitives 'held to service or labour,' and in a mixed and empirical rule of Popular representation. However these provisions may imply the true status of slavery, how much is it to be regretted that the Convention did not make (what might have been made so easily) an explicit declaration on the subject, that would have put it beyond the possibility of dispute, and re moved it from even the plausibility of party controversy!"

The Constitution formed by this Convention, although singularly deficient and so far from being esteemed by American demagogueism as "almost of Divine authority," actually one of the loosest political instruments in the world-contained one admirable and novel principle, which grew out of the combination of circumstances in the debate. One party in the Convention plausibly contended that its power was limited to a mere revision and amendment of the existing Articles of Confederation, and that it was authorized to add nothing to the Federal principle. Another party favoured the annihilation of the State governments. A third party stood between these extremes, and recommended a "national" government in the sense of a supreme power with respect to certain objects common between the States and committed to it. But when on this third plan the question of representation arose, it was found that the large States insisted upon a preponderating influence in both houses of the National Legislature, while the small States insisted on an equality of representation in each house; and out of this conflict came the mixed representation

"For many years the very obvious question of the power of the General Government to make 'internal improvements' has agitated the councils of America: and yet there is no text in the Constitution to regulate a matter which should have stared its authours in the face, but what may be derived, by the most forced and distant construction, from the powers of Congress 'to regulate commerce,' and to 'declare war,' and 'raise and support armies.'"

"For a longer period, and with a fierceness once almost fatal to the Union, has figured in the politics of America' the tariff question,' a contest between a party for revenue and a party for protective prohibitions. Both parties have fought over that vague platitude of the Constitution, the power of Congress' to regulate commerce;' and in the want of a more distinct language on a subject of such vast concern, there has been engendered a controversy which has progressed from the threshold of the history of the Union up to the period of its dissolution."

"With the territorial possessions of America, even at the date of the Convention, and with all that the future promised in the expansion of a system that yet scarcely occupied more than the water-slopes of a continent, it might be supposed that the men who formed the Constitution would have prepared a full and explicit article for the government of the territories. That vast and intricate subject-the power of the General Government over the territories, the true nature of these establishments, the status and political privileges of their inhabitants-is absolutely dismissed with this bald provision in the Constitution of the United States:

"New States may be admitted by Congress into this Union.'-ART. iv., SEC. 3."

In addition to these flagrant omissions of the Constitution may be observed a fault, which it was sought to correct in the Constitution of the Confederate States, and which has latterly grown much upon public attention. It is that defective construction of the Cabinet, which excludes all the ministers of the government from any participation in the legislative councils. The practical conse quences of this defective organization of the government is, that the relations between the Executive and Congress have gradually descended to a back-door communication, in which the Execu tive has lost its dignity, and American politics been severely scandalized. The relations of the British ministry to Parliament are such that a vote of censure, any night, may change the administration of public affairs. There is no such faculty of adaptation in the American system. If there is a variance between the Executive and Congress, the former communicates with its partisans in that body through the back-door and lobby, and the practical consequences are bribery, corruption, and all sorts of devious and unworthy appliances to the legislation of the country.

THE CONSTITUTION A COMPROMISE.

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of the people and the States, each in a different house of Congress; and on this basis of agreement was reared the Constitution of the United States of America.

The great novelty of this Constitution-the association of the principle of State sovereignty with a common government of delegated powers acting on individuals under specifications of authority, and thus, therefore, not merely a Federal league-is scarcely to be esteemed as an a priori discovery, and to be ascribed, as American vanity would have it, to the wis dom of our forefathers. The mixed representation of the people and the States originated, as we have seen, in a jealousy sprung in the Convention, and is better described as the fruit of an accident than the elaborate production of human wisdom. It was a compromise. It simply extricated the Convention from a dead-lock of votes between the large and the small States as to the rule of representation. But it was of immense importance as the initial and necessary measure of the combination of State Sovereignty with the simple republic. There is reason to suppose that the framers of the Constitution did not fully comprehend the importance of the great political principle on which they had stumbled, with its long train of consequences, and that, as often happens to simple men, they had fallen upon a discovery, of the value of which they had but a dim apprehension.

The principle involved in the measure of the Convention referred to was more fully and perfectly developed in the Amendments, which were the fruit of the legislative wisdom of the States, not of that of the Convention, and were designed to give a full development and a proper accuracy to what was certainly ill-performed work in it. The following Amendments were embodied in the official declarations of at least six of the States, coupled with their ratification of the Constitution, and made by them the conditions precedent to such ratification.

"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

The Union, thus constituted, was not a consolidated nationality. It was not a simple republic, with an appendage of provinces. It was not, on the other hand, a mere league of States with no power to reach individuals. It was an association of sovereign States with a common authority qualified to reach individuals within the scope of the powers delegated to it by the States, and employed with subjects sufficient to give it for cer tain purposes the effect of an American and national identity.

At the separation from the British Empire, the people of America pre ferred the establishment of themselves into thirteen separate sovereignties,

instead of incorporating themselves into one. To these they looked up for the security of their lives, liberties, and properties. The Federal government they formed to defend the whole against foreign nations in time of war, and to defend the lesser States against the ambition of the larger. They were afraid of granting power unnecessarily, lest they should defeat the original end of the Union; lest the powers should prove dangerous to the sovereignties of the particular States which the Union was meant to support, and expose the lesser to being swallowed up by the larger.

The articles of the first Confederation had provided that "the Union shall be perpetual." Notwithstanding this, as we have seen, another convention subsequently assembled which adopted the present Constitution of the United States. Article VII. provided that "the ratifications of nine States shall be sufficient for the establishment of this Constitution, between the States ratifying the same." In effect, this Constitution was ratified at first by only a portion of the States composing the previous Union, each at different dates and in its sovereign capacity as a State, so that the second Union was created by States which "seceded" from the first Union, three of which, in their acts of ratification, expressly reserved the right to secede again. Virginia, in giving her assent to the Constitution, said: "We, the delegates of the people of Virginia, duly elected, etc., etc., do, in the name and in behalf of the people of Virginia, declare and make known that the powers granted under the Constitution, being derived from the people of the United States, may be resumed by them whenever the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression." The State of New York said that "the powers of Government may be re-assumed by the people whenever it shall become necessary to their happiness." And the State of Rhode Island adopted the same language.

The reader of American history must guard his mind against the errour that the Union was, in any sense, a constitutional revolution, or a proclamation of a new civil polity. The civil institutions of the States were already perfect and satisfactory. The Union was nothing more than a convenience of the States, and had no mission apart from them. It had no value as an additional guaranty of personal liberty, nor yet for its prohibitions of invasion of individual rights. These had been declared with equal clearness and vigour five centuries before in the Great Charter at Runnymede, had been engrafted upon the Colonial Governments, and were the recognized muniments of American liberty.

The novelty and value of the Federal Constitution was the nice adjustment of the relations of the State and Federal Governments, by which they both became co-ordinate and essential parts of one harmonious system; the nice arrangement of the powers of the State and Federal Governments, by which was left to the States the exclusive guardianship of their domestic affairs, and of the interests of their citizens, and was granted to the Federal

THE DOCTRINE OF STATE RIGHTS.

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Government the exclusive control of their international and inter-State rela tions; the economy of the powers of the States with which the Federal Government was endowed; the paucity of subjects and of powers, withdrawn from the States, and committed to the Federal Government. It was the recognition of the idea of Confederation-the appreciation of the value of local self-government. It was the recognition that the States were the creators and their powers were inherent, and that the Federal Government was the creature and its powers were delegated.

The two great political schools of America-that of Consolidation and that of State Rights-were founded on different estimates of the relations of the General Government to the States. All other controversies in the political history of the country were subordinate and incidental to this great division of parties. We see, at once, how it involved the question of negro-slavery in the South. The agitation of this question was a necessity of the Consolidation doctrine, which was mainly the Northern theory of the government; for duty being the correlative of power, the central government at Washington was responsible for the continuance or existence of slavery in proportion to its power over it. On the other hand, the State Rights party assented to the logical integrity of the proposition that if the government had been consolidated into one, slavery might have been abolished, or made universal throughout the whole; but they claimed that the States had retained their sovereignty, for the reason, among others, that they desired to avoid giving any pretext to the General Gov ernment for attempting to control their internal affairs; and they, therefore, contended that the Northern party could with no more reason assail the domestic institutions of the South than they could attack the similar institutions of Cuba and Brazil.

The difference between the State Rights and Consolidation schools may be briefly and sharply stated. The one regarded the Union as a compact between the States: the other regarded the Union as a national government set up above and over the States. The first adopted its doctrine from the very words of the Constitution; the seventh article for the ratification of the Constitution reading as follows:

"The ratification of the Conventions of nine States shall be sufficient for the establishment of this constitution BETWEEN the States so ratifying the same."

The great text of the State Rights school is to be found in the famous Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798. These resolutions are properly to be taken as corollaries drawn from those carefully-worded clauses of the Constitution, which were designed to exclude the idea that the separate and independent sovereignty of each State was merged intc