The American Commonwealth - Viscount James Bryce

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that which is incident to a simple centralized government. In America, however, smoothness of working is secured by elaboration of device; and complex as the mechanism of the government may appear, the citizens have grown so familiar with it that its play is smooth and easy, attended with less trouble, and certainly with less suspicion on the part of the people, than would belong to a scheme which vested all powers in one administration and one legislature. The expense is admitted, but is considered no grave defect when compared with the waste which arises from untrustworthy officials and legislators whose depredations would, it is thought, be greater were their sphere of action wider, and the checks upon them fewer. He who examines a system of government from without is generally disposed to overrate the difficulties in working which its complexity causes. Few things, for instance, are harder than to explain to a person who has not been a student in one of the two ancient English universities the nature of their highly complex constitution and the relation of the colleges to the university. If he does apprehend it he pronounces it too intricate for the purposes it has to serve. To those who have grown up under it, nothing is simpler and more obvious.

      There is a blemish characteristic of the American federation which Americans seldom notice because it seems to them unavoidable. This is the practice in selecting candidates for federal office of regarding not so much the merits of the candidate as the effect which his nomination will have upon the vote of the state to which he belongs. Second-rate men are run for first-rate posts, not because the party which runs them overrates their capacity, but because it expects to carry their state either by their local influence or through the pleasure which the state feels in the prospect of seeing one of its own citizens in high office. This of course works in favour of the politicians who come from a large state. No doubt the leading men of a large state are prima facie more likely to be men of high ability than those of a small state, because the field of choice is wider and the competition keener. One is reminded of the story of the leading citizen in the isle of Seriphus who observed to Themistocles, “You would not have been famous had you been born in Seriphus,” to which Themistocles replied, “Neither would you had you been born in Athens.” The two great states of Virginia and Massachusetts reared one half of the men who won distinction in the first fifty years of the history of the Republic. Nevertheless it often happens that a small state produces a first-rate man, whom the country ought to have in its highest places, but who is passed over because the federal system gives great weight to the voice of a state, and because state sentiment is so strong that the voters of a state which has a large and perhaps a doubtful vote to cast in national elections, prefer an inferior man in whom they are directly interested to a superior one who is a stranger. It is also unfortunate that the president’s liberty of choice in forming his cabinet should be restricted by the doctrine that he must not have in it, if possible, two persons from the same state.

      I have left to the last the gravest reproach which Europeans have been wont to bring against federalism in America. They attributed to it the origin, or at least the virulence, of the great struggle over slavery which tried the Constitution so severely. That struggle created parties which, though they had adherents everywhere, no doubt tended more and more to become identified with states, controlling the state organizations and bending the state governments to their service. It gave tremendous importance to legal questions arising out of the differences between the law of the slave states and the free states, questions which the Constitution had either evaded or not foreseen. It shook the credit of the Supreme Court by making the judicial decision of those questions appear due to partiality to the slave states. It disposed the extreme men on both sides to hate the federal Union which bound them in the same body with their antagonists. It laid hold of the doctrine of states’ rights and state sovereignty as entitling a commonwealth which deemed itself aggrieved to shake off allegiance to the national government. Thus at last it brought about secession and the great civil war. Even when the war was over, the dregs of the poison continued to haunt and vex the system, and bred fresh disorders in it. The constitutional duty of reestablishing the state governments of the conquered states on the one hand, and on the other hand the practical 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 sequelae behind.

      In blaming either the conduct of a person or the plan and scheme of a government for evils which have actually followed, one is 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

      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 the 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 everyone knows, have been made for resettling the relations of Ireland to Great Britain, and of the self-governing British colonies to the United Kingdom. There are causes and conditions which dispose nations 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 where it is adopted for the sake of tightening or for the sake of loosening a preexisting bond.1

      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

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