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in 1789 agreed that the federal government should not only dictate the laws, but that it should execute its own enactments. In both cases the right is the same, but the exercise of the right is different; and this alteration produced the most momentous consequences.
In all the confederations which had been formed before the American Union, the federal government demanded its supplies at the hands of the separate governments; and if the measure it prescribed was onerous to any one of those bodies, means were found to evade its claims: if the state was powerful, it had recourse to arms; if it was weak, it connived at the resistance which the law of the Union, its sovereign, met with, and resorted to inaction under the plea of inability. Under these circumstances one of two alternatives has invariably occurred: either the most preponderant of the allied peoples has assumed the privileges of the federal authority, and ruled all the other states in its name,[1] or the federal government has been abandoned by its natural supporters, anarchy has arisen between the confederates, and the Union has lost all power of action.[2]
In America the subjects of the Union are not states, but private citizens: the national government levies a tax, not upon the state of Massachusetts, but upon each inhabitant of Massachusetts. All former confederate governments presided over communities, but that of the Union rules individuals; its force is not borrowed, but self-derived; and it is served by its own civil and military officers, by its own army, and its own courts of justice. It cannot be doubted that the spirit of the nation, the passions of the multitude, and the provincial prejudices of each state, tend singularly to diminish the authority of a federal authority thus constituted, and to facilitate the means of resistance to its mandates; but the comparative weakness of a restricted sovereignty is an evil inherent in the federal system. In America, each state has fewer opportunities of resistance, and fewer temptations to non-compliance; nor can such a design be
- ↑ This was the case in Greece, when Philip undertook to execute the decree of the Amphictyons; in the Low Countries, where the province of Holland always gave the law; and in our own time in the Germanic confederation, in which Austria and Prussia assume a great degree of influence over the whole country, in the name of the Diet.
- ↑ Such has always been the situation of the Swiss confederation, which would have perished ages ago but for the mutual jealousies of its neighbours.
