State-building

“ I recommend also such legislation as will render available and efficient for the purposes of instruction, so far as is consistent with the public service, the cabinets or museums of invention, of surgery, of education, and of agriculture, and other collections the property of the National Government.
The capital of the nation should be something more than a mere political center. ”

“ Now, I conceive, if we do any thing to conciliate the minds of people to the Constitution, we ought not to modify the principle of the government so as to increase the evil complained of, by a further blending of the executive and legislative powers, and that too upon construction, when gentlemen deny that we ought to use construction in any case. ”

“ You know you sometimes get frightened and discouraged about the laws that some of the States are inclined to pass, and that some of them are passing, but there is no State, there is no municipality, there is no power on earth, that can neutralize the influence of a high, pure, simple and useful life. ”

“ There was no power given to expend money in roads and canals in the states; there was no such power specifically given to the United States; and when once it was settled in this house that power could be derived to this government by construction, you have discovered the means by which the whole power of a state might be frittered down and annihilated. ”

“ I rely on the efficacy of reform in the constitutional system by which these colonies are governed, for the removal of every abuse in their administration which defective institutions have engendered. If a system can be devised which shall lay in these countries the foundation of an efficient and popular government, ensure harmony, in place of collision, between the various powers of the State, and bring the influence of a vigorous public opinion to bear on every detail of public affairs, we may rely on sufficient remedies being found for the present vices of the administrative system. ”

“ Those who have either themselves remodelled the framework of State constitutions, or proposed schemes of political reform, seem mostly to have studied how to apportion the respective provinces which the nation, and any of its separate elements, should justly share in the administration,—to assign the due functions of each in the governmental plan,—and to adopt the precautions necessary for preserving the integrity of the several interests at stake. ”

“ To form a good system of government for a single city or state, however limited as to territory, or inconsiderable as to numbers, has been thought to require the strongest efforts of human genius. With what conscious diffidence, then, must the members of the Convention have revolved in their minds the immense undertaking which was before them. ”

“ In the progress of nations, land acquires a valu, proportioned to the degree of populousness; and other objects grow into estimation, by their utility, convenience, or some plezure they afford to the imagination.
[pg 326] In attending to the principles of guvernment, the leeding idea that strikes the mind, iz, that political power depends mostly on property; consequently guvernment will take its complection from the divisions of property in the state. ”

“ Accustomed thus to consider the State bound to maintain them, the moment the State fails in that impossible task, they will accommodate their honesty to a rush upon property under the name of social reform. ”

“ The Federal and state governments are parts of one system, alike necessary for the common prosperity, peace and security, and ought to be regarded alike with a cordial, habitual and immovable attachment. ”

“ Having no legislature of its own, either municipal or general, its people must look to Congress for the regulation of all those concerns that in the States are the subject of local control. Our whole people have an interest that the national capital should be made attractive and beautiful, and, above all, that its repute for social order should be well maintained. ”

“ If the integrity of any state can only be maintained at the cost of war, and if that state is more than what many so-called states have been,—more than an aggregation of individuals or communities under one ruling power,—if it so far fulfils the idea of a state, that its maintenance is necessary to the free development of the people belonging to it ”

“ Rightly or wrongly, men of the upper classes believed that the foundations of society were threatened and that the State Governments would fall a prey to the radical and unpropertied elements, unless a stronger Federal Government were created. "With this idea, they are thinking, very seriously," wrote an interested observer at the seat of Federal Government in New York, "in what manner to effect the most easy and natural change of the present form of the Federal Government to one more energetic, that will, at the same time, create respect, and secure properly life, liberty, and property. ”

“ It belongs in the nature of a federative state that it should not claim for itself all state-duties but should content itself with exercising only such functions as demand a centralized organization. In consequence we see the individual states unfolding great activity in the field of internal administration, in the furtherance of education, art and science, in the care of the poor: matters with which the empire as a whole has practically nothing to do. ”

“ Especially is wariness enjoined when the problem of construction implicates one of the recurring phases of our federalism and involves striking a balance between national and state authority in one of the most sensitive areas of government. ”

“ Important as are the functions of a State in the administration of local government, especially in resisting an overbearing centralization, they must not be exalted above the Nation in its own appropriate sphere. ”

“ Therefore statesmanship must neglect its achievements (though continuity of government may compel their continuance for awhile) and must make a direct approach to the national life, and its needs and necessities, human and economic, in order to build again, however slowly to build, from the foundations the structure that those foundations decree and suggest. ”

“ A coalescence of the people into bodies politic in territorial areas now became complete.
The territorial series enters into the plan of government of modern civilized nations. Among ourselves, for example, we have the township, the county, the state, and the United States; the inhabitants of each of which are an organized body politic with powers of local self-government. Each organization is in full vitality and performs its functions within a definite sphere in which it is supreme. ”

“ Without any inconsistency with natural reason, the government, even thus created, might be trusted with this power of construction. The extent of its powers, therefore, must still be sought for in the instrument itself. ”

“ For instance, your State has now scarcely the privileges of a simple territory; your interests differ entirely from those of the central States of the Republic. Every day your laws are becoming more centralised. ”

“ Instead of giving us the mere data of area, population, wealth, and industry in a State, from which its real condition can never be fully and accurately determined, it should proceed from a consideration of the real state of the country and its inhabitants, and endeavour to convey the extent and nature of their active, passive, and enjoying powers, with such gradual modifications as these receive, either from the force of national union, or from the influence of the political organization. ”

“ The state is a real organization of defense to guarantee and perpetuate a mode of association, the foundation of which is a form of economic production, or a compact and a transaction between forms. To sum up, the state assumes, either a system of property, or a compact between several systems of property. There is the foundation of all its art, the exercise of which demands that the state itself became an economic power, and that it also dispose of means and processes to make property pass from the hands of some into the hands of others. ”

“ We want the wise State councillors who, under the Emperor, reflected on the laws, and a legislative body elected by the intelligence of the country as well as by the land-owners, whose only function would be to oppose bad legislation and capricious wars. ”

“ But in a State many institutions must be adopted, and much political machinery invented, accompanied by appropriate political arrangements—necessitating long struggles of the understanding before what is really appropriate can be discovered—involving, moreover, contentions with private interest and passions and a tedious discipline of the latter in order to bring about the desired harmony. The epoch when a State attains this harmonious condition marks the period of its bloom, its virtue, its vigor, and its prosperity. ”

“ Such a system—in allowing each province to participate in political power and action, and in balancing industry, intelligence, and strength in all parts of the country—would equally secure, against enemies at home and enemies abroad, the liberty of the people and the stability of the government. ”

“ In this manner were communities formed with magical rapidity; and most of those who witnessed the purchase of the empty empire, have lived to see already a populous and sovereign state, parcelled from its inhabitants, and received into the bosom of the national Union, on terms of political equality. ”

“ Powerful and ingenious minds, taking, as postulates, that the powers expressly granted to the government of the Union, are to be contracted, by construction, into the narrowest possible compass, and that the original powers of the States are retained, if any possible construction will retain them, may, by a course of well digested, but refined and metaphysical reasoning, founded on these premises, explain away the constitution of our country, and leave it a magnificent structure indeed, to look at, but totally unfit for use. ”

“ The means by which national exigencies are to be provided for, national inconveniences obviated, and national prosperity promoted, are of such infinite variety, extent, and complexity, that here must of necessity be great latitude of discretion in the selection and application of those means. Hence the necessity and propriety of exercising the authority intrusted to a government on principles of liberal construction. ”

“ A politically regenerated state would guarantee in its constitution a much larger measure of home rule to the cities than they now enjoy, while at the same time the reformed legislative authority would endeavor to secure the edifying exercise of these larger powers, not by an embarrassing system of supervision, but by the concentration of the administrative power and responsibility of the municipal authorities. ”

“ In short, the commercial and political happiness, the liberty and property, the peace, safety, and general welfare, both internal and external, of each and all the states, depend on that power; which, as it must be applied to a vast variety of objects, and to cases and exigencies beyond the ken of human prescience, must be very great ”

“ Even in the older states, where society is most homogeneous and has fewest of the elements of disquiet and disorder, the state reserves to itself the right to shape municipal institutions; and towns and cities are only formed under its directions, and according to the rules and within the limits the state prescribes. ”

“ No other State provides more liberally for its unfortunates, in asylums for the insane, the blind, the deaf-mutes, the idiotic, the young waifs and strays, nor shows a more intelligent comprehension of the legitimate functions of a great commonwealth, in the creation of boards of education and of charities and of health, in a State inspection of workshops and factories, in establishing bureaus of meteorology and of forestry, a fish commission, and an agricultural experiment station. ”

“ Yet the actual attributions of the State authorities cover by far the largest part of the province of government; and by this division of labor and authority, the problem of fixing for the nation a political centre of gravity is divested of a large part of its difficulty and danger, in some proportions to the limitations of the working precinct. ”

“ Every town-gate and village taxing-house had its band of citizen-patriots, with their national muskets in a most explosive state of readiness, who stopped all comers and goers, cross-questioned them, inspected their papers, looked for their names in lists of their own, turned them back, or sent them on, or stopped them and laid them in hold, as their capricious judgment or fancy deemed best for the dawning Republic One and Indivisible, of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death. ”

“ They are the interests of nearly fifty millions of people spread over an immense surface, with occupations, pursuits and industries of endless variety and great magnitude; large cities with elements of population scarcely known here in the early days, and all these producing aspirations and interests so pushing, powerful and complicated in their nature, and so constantly appealing to the Government rightfully or wrongfully, that the requirements of statesmanship demanded in this age are far different from those which sufficed a century ago. ”

“ The remarkable growth and prosperity of our new States and Territories attest the wisdom of the legislation which invites the tiller of the soil to secure a permanent home on terms within the reach of all. The pioneer who incurs the dangers and privations of a frontier life, and thus aids in laying the foundation of new commonwealths, renders a signal service to his country, and is entitled to its special favor and protection. ”