the majority of the community must rule. Its rule will in the end be better than that of any external power.” No doctrine more completely pervades the American people, the instructed as well as the uninstructed. Philosophers will tell you that it is the method by which Nature governs, in whose economy error is followed by pain and suffering, whose laws carry their own sanction with them. Divines will tell you that it is the method by which God governs: God is a righteous Judge and God is provoked every day, yet He makes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends His rain upon the just and the unjust. He does not directly intervene to punish faults, but leaves sin to bring its own appointed penalty. Statesmen will point to the troubles which followed the attempt to govern the reconquered seceding states, first, by military force and then by keeping a great part of their population disfranchised, and will declare that such evils as still exist in the South are far less grave than those which the denial of ordinary self-government involved. “So,” they pursue, “Texas and California will in time unlearn their bad habits and come out right if we leave them alone: Federal interference, even had we the machinery needed for prosecuting it, would check the natural process by which the better elements in these raw communities are purging away the maladies of youth, and reaching the settled health of manhood.”
A European may say that there is a dangerous side to this application of democratic faith in local majorities and in laissez aller. Doubtless there is; yet those who have learnt to know the Americans will answer that no nation so well understands its own business.
Criticism of the Federal System
All Americans have long been agreed that the only possible form of government for their country is a federal one. All have perceived that a centralized system would be inexpedient, if not unworkable, over so large an area, and have still more strongly felt that to cut up the continent into absolutely independent states would not only involve risks of war but injure commerce and retard in a thousand ways the material development of every part of the country. But regarding the nature of the federal tie that ought to exist there have been keen and frequent controversies, dormant at present, but which might break out afresh should there arise a new question of social or economic change capable of bringing the powers of Congress into collision with the wishes of any state or group of states. The general suitability to the country of a federal system is therefore accepted, and need not be discussed. I pass to consider the strong and weak points of that which exists.
The faults generally charged on federations as compared with unified governments are the following:
I. Weakness in the conduct of foreign affairs
II. Weakness in home government, that is to say, deficient authority over the component states and the individual citizens
III. Liability to dissolution by the secession or rebellion of states
IV. Liability to division into groups and factions by the formation of separate combinations of the component states
V. Absence of the power of legislating on certain subjects wherein legislation uniform over the whole Union is needed
VI. Want of uniformity among the states in legislation and administration
VII. Trouble, expense, and delay due to the complexity of a double system of legislation and administration
The first four of these are all due to the same cause, viz., the existence within one government, which ought to be able to speak and act in the name and with the united strength of the nation, of distinct centres of force, organized political bodies into which part of the nation’s strength has flowed, and whose resistance to the will of the majority of the whole nation is likely to be more effective than could be the resistance of individuals, because such bodies have each of them a government, a revenue, a militia, a local patriotism to unite them, whereas individual recalcitrants, however numerous, would be unorganized, and less likely to find a legal standing ground for opposition. The gravity of the first two of the four alleged faults has been exaggerated by most writers, who have assumed, on insufficient grounds, that federal governments are necessarily weak. Let us, however, see how far America has experienced such troubles from these features of a federal system.
I. In its early years, the Union was not successful in the management of its foreign relations. Few popular governments are, because a successful foreign policy needs in a world such as ours conditions which popular governments seldom enjoy. In the days of Adams, Jefferson, and Madison, the Union put up with a great deal of ill-treatment from France as well as from England. It drifted rather than steered into the war of 1812. The conduct of that war was hampered by the opposition of the New England states. The Mexican war of 1846 was due to the slaveholders; but the combination among the Southern leaders which entrapped the nation into that conflict might have been equally successful in a unified country; the blame need not be laid at the door of federalism. The principle of abstention from Old World complications has been so heartily and consistently adhered to that the capacities of the federal system for the conduct of foreign affairs have been seldom seriously tried, so far as concerned European powers; and the likelihood of any danger from abroad is so slender that it may be practically ignored. But when a question of external policy arises which interests only one part of the Union (such, for instance, as the immigration of Asiatic labourers), the existence of states feeling themselves specially affected may have a strong and probably an unfortunate influence. Only in this way can the American government be deemed likely to suffer in its foreign relations from its federal character.
II. For the purposes of domestic government the federal authority is now, in ordinary times, sufficiently strong. However, as was remarked in the last chapter, there have been occasions when the resistance of even a single state disclosed its weakness. Had a man less vigorous than Jackson occupied the presidential chair in 1832, South Carolina would probably have prevailed against the Union. In the Kansas troubles of 1855–56 the national executive played a sorry part; and even in the resolute hands of President Grant it was hampered in the reestablishment of order in the reconquered Southern states by the rights which the federal Constitution secured to those states. The only general conclusion on this point which can be drawn from history is that while the central government is likely to find less and less difficulty in enforcing its will against a state or disobedient subjects, because the prestige of its success in the Civil War has strengthened it, and the facilities of communication make the raising and moving of troops more easy, nevertheless recalcitrant states, or groups of states, still enjoy certain advantages for resistance, advantages due partly to their legal position, partly to their local sentiment, which rebels might not have in unified countries like England, France, or Italy.
III. Everybody knows that it was the federal system and the doctrine of state sovereignty grounded thereon, and not excluded, though not recognized, by the Constitution, which led to the secession of 1861, and which gave European powers a plausible ground for recognizing the insurgent minority as belligerents. Nothing seems now less probable than another secession, not merely because the supposed legal basis for it has been abandoned, and because the advantages of continued union are more obvious than ever before, but because the precedent of the victory won by the North will discourage like attempts in the future.1 This is so strongly felt that it has not even been thought worth while to add to the Constitution an amendment negativing the right to secede. The doctrine of the legal indestructibility of the Union is now well established. To establish it, however, cost thousands of millions of dollars and the lives of a million of men.
IV. The combination of states into groups was a familiar feature of politics before the war. South Carolina and the Gulf states constituted one such, and the most energetic, group; the New England states frequently acted as another,
