39

danger of doing so while their people remained disaffected, produced the Military Governments, the “Carpet-bag’ Governments, the Ku Klux Klan outrages, the gift of suffrage to a negro population unfit for such a privilege, yet apparently capable of being protected in no other way. All these mischiefs, it has often been argued, are the results of the Federal structure of the Government, which carried in its bosom the seeds of its own destruction, seeds sure to ripen so soon as there arose a question that stirred men deeply.

It may be answered not merely that the National Government has survived this struggle and emerged from it stronger than before, but also that Federalism did not produce the struggle, but only gave to it the particular form of a series of legal controversies over the Federal pact followed by a war of States against the Union. Where such vast economic interests were involved, and such hot passions roused, there must anyhow have been a conflict, and it may well be that a conflict raging within the vitals of a centralized government would have proved no less terrible and would have left as many noxious sequele behind.

In blaming either the conduct of a person or the plan and scheme of a government for evils which have actually followed, men are apt to overlook those other evils, perhaps as great, which might have flowed from different conduct or some other plan. All that can fairly be concluded from the history of the American Union is that Federalism is obliged by the law of its nature to leave in the hands of States powers whose exercise may give to political controversy a peculiarly dangerous form, may impede the assertion of National authority, may even, when long-continued exasperation has suspended or destroyed the feeling of a common patriotism, threaten National unity itself. Against this danger is to be set the fact that the looser structure of a

Federal Government and the scope it gives for diversities of legislation in different parts of a country may avert sources of discord, or prevent local discord from growing into a contest of national magnitude.

MERITS OF THE FEDERAL SYSTEM 1

JAMES BRYCE

I Do not propose to discuss in this chapter the advantages of Federalism in general, for to do this we should have to wander off to other times and countries, to talk of Achaia and the Hanseatic League and the Swiss Confederation. I shall comment on those merits only which experience of the American Union illustrates.

There are two distinct lines of argument by which their Federal system was recommended to the framers of the Constitution, and upon which it is still held forth for imitation to other countries. These lines have been so generally confounded that it is well to present them in a precise form. The first set of arguments point to Federalism proper, and are the following: —

1. That Federalism furnishes the means of uniting commonwealths into one nation under one National Government without extinguishing their separate administrations, legislatures, and local patriotisms. As the Americans of 1787 would probably have preferred complete State independence to the fusion of their States into a unified government, Federalism was the only resource. So when the new Germanic Empire, which is really a Federation, was established in 1871, Bavaria and Würtemberg could not have been brought under a national government save by a Federal scheme. Similar suggestions, as every one knows, have been made for re-setting the

1 The American Commonwealth (Revised Edition), part 1, chapter xxx. Reprinted through the generous permission of The Macmillan Company.

relations of Ireland to Great Britain, and of the selfgoverning British colonies to the United Kingdom. There are causes and conditions which dispose independent or semi-independent communities, or peoples living under loosely compacted governments, to form a closer union in a Federal form. There are other causes and conditions which dispose the subjects of one government, or sections of these subjects, to desire to make their governmental union less close by substituting a Federal for a unitary system. In both sets of cases, the centripetal or centrifugal forces spring from the local position, the history, the sentiments, the economic needs of those among whom the problem arises; and that which is good for one people or political body is not necessarily good for another. Federalism is an equally legitimate resource whether it is adopted for the sake of tightening or for the sake of loosening a preexisting bond.

2. That Federalism supplies the best means of developing a new and vast country. It permits an expansion whose extent, and whose rate and manner of progress, cannot be foreseen to proceed with more variety of methods, more adaptation of laws and administration to the circumstances of each part of the territory, and altogether in a more truly natural and spontaneous way, than can be expected under a centralized government, which is disposed to apply its settled system through all its dominions. Thus the special needs of a new region are met by the inhabitants in the way they find best: its laws can be adapted to the economic conditions which from time to time present themselves: its special evils can be cured by special remedies, perhaps more drastic than

an old country demands, perhaps more lax than an old country would tolerate; while at the same time the spirit of self-reliance among those who build up these new communities is stimulated and respected. 3. That Federalism prevents the rise of a despotic central government, absorbing other powers, and menacing the private liberties of the citizen. This may now seem to have been an idle fear, so far as America was concerned. It was, however, a very real fear among the ancestors of the present Americans, and nearly led to the rejection even of so undespotic an instrument as the Federal Constitution of 1789. Congress (or the President, as the case may be) is still sometimes described as a tyrant by the party which does not control it, simply because it is a central government: and the States are represented as bulwarks against its encroach

ments.

The second set of arguments relate to and recommend not so much Federalism as local self-government. I state them briefly because they are familiar:

4. Self-government stimulates the interest of people in the affairs of their neighborhood, sustains local political life, educates the citizen in his daily round of civic duty, teaches him that perpetual vigilance and the sacrifice of his own time and labor are the price that must be paid for individual liberty and collective prosperity.

5. Self-government secures the good administration of local affairs by giving the inhabitants of each locality due means of overseeing the conduct of their busi

ness.

That these two sets of grounds are distinct appears from the fact that the sort of local interest which local self-gov