Statecraft

“ I am not aware that history furnishes any example in which a number of these political atoms or corpuscles have coalesced into a body, and learned to feel themselves one people, except through previous subjection to a central authority common to all. [2] It is through the habit of deferring to that authority, entering into its plans and subserving its purposes, that a people such as we have supposed receive into their minds the conception of large interests common to a considerable geographical extent. ”

“ If such should become the fate of your Constitution, ask yourselves what must be the motive of your government? It is easier to govern a province by a faction than to govern a coordinate country by coordinate means. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The State and Its Sovereignty.—The various economic and social functions that are exercised by the people as a nation can be performed in an orderly and effective way only when the people are organized politically, and the nation has full powers of sovereignty. When the nation functions politically it is a state. States may be large like Russia, or small like Montenegro; they may have full sovereignty like Great Britain, or limited sovereignty like New York; the fact that they exercise political authority makes them states. ”

“ Should our experiment succeed, such will be our exhibition—a machinery of government so intricate, so complicated, with so many separate and distinct parts, so many independent States, each perfect in the attributes and functions of sovereignty, within its own jurisdiction, all, nevertheless, united under the control of a common directing power for external objects and purposes, may natural enough seem novel, strange, and inexplicable to the philosophers and crowned heads of the world. ”

“ It was obvious, from experience and observation, that these organizations were armed with a wide spread, and many of them with an all pervading influence; and that they were admirably calculated to acquire power, and to bring to [4] bear an efficient and energetic action on their specific objects. In their history and progress, as their exigencies have seemed to require, they have severally erected a sort of State machinery, with a Constitution as a general basis of polity; with the customary law-making, executive and judicial powers ”

“ Independent states stretched over an immense territory, and known only by common difficulty, clinging to their Union as the rock of their safety, deciding by frank comparison of their relative condition, to rear on that rock, under the guidance of reason, a common government through whose commanding protection, liberty and order, with their long train of blessings, should be safe to themselves and the sure inheritance of their posterity. ”

“ I view the states as made for the people, as well as by them, and not the people as made for the states; the people, therefore, have a right, whilst enjoying the undeniable powers of society, to form either a general government, or state governments, in what manner they please, or to accommodate them to one another, and by this means preserve them all. ”

“ Statesmanship can be reduced to three principles or maxims: the first is to maintain your power and, according to circumstances, to increase and extend it, just as I doubled my army on reaching the throne for the sole purposes of conquest. Make sure of your army; have plenty of money and bide a favourable time; you can then be certain, not only of preserving your States, but of adding to them. The term 'balance of power' is one which has subjugated the whole world ”

“ These articulations of political society, which determine the organization of the army, the mode of taxation, and the right of participation in the government of the State, develop, as we have already seen, out of totemic tribal organization, as a result of the external conditions attendant upon the migrations and wars connected with the rise of States. But they also exhibit throughout the traces of statutes expressing the will and recording the decisions of individual rulers, though even here, of course, universal human motives are decisive. ”

“ Civilized states are forced to supersede the local jurisdiction of uncivilized or half-civilized states, in order to police the territory and establish the necessary guarantees of industry and commerce. ”

“ But again, the state system of government, in all its details, awakens the genius and elicits the energies of the citizens, by the high inducement to exertion held out to all,—from the stimulating hope of influencing the [p. 273] destinies of others, and becoming useful to mankind and an ornament to our country. Under the benign operation of the federative system, the hope of rising to some distinction in the commonwealth, is breathed into us all. From the highest to the lowest, we stand ready and anxious to step forth into the service of our country. ”

“ But in another capacity it is the government of the whole empire, and provides the bond of common authority which unites all the constituent states of the empire into a single body politic. In a federal, as contrasted with an imperial constitution, there is no such predominance of one of the constituent states. The government of the whole is one in which all the parts have their allotted shares. ”

“ 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 nationalisation of States, which is the fundamental fact of modern history, affects both policy and strategy. If the State is a nation, the population associated as one body, then the force which it can use in case of conflict represents the sum of the energies of the whole population, and this force cannot and will not be used except as the expression of the will of the whole population. ”

“ Instead of a body of efficient and responsible officials, directly and immediately dependent upon their superiors, receiving wages and hoping for promotion, such as successful centralized governments have usually possessed, the king and council made use of the old and cumbrous machinery of local self-government as they found it. ”

“ How much more sublime is the idea of forming a great nation, by a chain of republicks, subordinate to publick good, than by a chain of satraps subordinate to imperial will, or of chartered companies subordinate to selfish avarice? Such a system stands upon national interest. No people, except ourselves, have seriously attempted to make this interest the basis of civil government. ”

“ I declare that the maintenance inviolate of the rights of the states, and especially the right of each state to order and control its own domestic institutions according to its own judgment exclusively, is essential to that balance of powers on which the perfection and endurance of our political fabric depend. ”

“ In the first place we have a recapitulation of those general or national powers that properly belong to the central authority, such as customs and excise duties, regulation of trade and commerce, militia and defence, post-office, banking and coinage, railways and public works "for the general advantage," navigation and shipping, naturalisation and aliens, fisheries, weights and measures, marriage and divorce, penitentiaries, criminal law, census and statistics. ”

“ The preservation of the states in a certain degree of agency is indispensable. It will produce that collision between the different authorities which should be wished for in order to check each other. ”

“ The powers, therefore, belonging to any branch of our government, are to be construed and settled, not by remote analogies drawn from other governments, but from the words of the grant itself, in their plain sense and necessary import, and according to an interpretation consistent with our own history and the spirit of our own institutions. ”

“ In contests of this nature, where a considerable body of people who have attempted to free themselves of the control of the superior government have reached such point in occupation of territory, in power, and in general organization as to constitute in fact a body politic; having a government in substance as well as in name; possessed of the elements of stability and equipped with the machinery for the administration of internal policy and the execution of its laws ”

“ To a philosophical observer of the Republic, at the end of the hundred years, I should say that the important facts are not its industrial energy, its wealth, or its population, but the stability of the federal power, and the integrity of the individual States. ”

“ Under the Second of these Divisions may be ranged all the Art of the Legislator and Politician, all the power of Laws and Government. These do constitute the Civil Power; and a State may then be said to be in good Order, when all the other Powers are subservient to this; when they own its superior Excellence and Energy, pay it a ready Obedience, and all unite in Support of its Rule. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But further.—This central government itself, like the nation which it serves, is a compound body; a unit composed of parts, each of which in its own sphere is independent, yet beyond that sphere is limited by the functions of the other parts. This government is a triple compound, and consists of the legislative, the judicial, and the executive departments.
The legislative, or Congress, declares the will of the nation. ”

“ In short, the real federal aspect of the nation, if we penetrate beneath constitutional forms to the deeper currents of social, economic and political life, will be found to lie in the relation of sections and nation, rather than in the relation of States and nation. ”

“ Such is their true position — a position, not only essential in theory, in the formation of a federal government — but to its preservation in practice. Without it, the system could not have been formed — and without it, it cannot be preserved. The supervision of the creating power is indispensable to the preservation of the created. ”

“ Systems so organized, would then be in line with a true conception of the functions of an ideal republic—a government for the people, of the people and by the people; conducted for the benefit, protection and development of all the people. With the world organized into families of such republics, the advent of the millennium could be predicted, and the advancement of the race to the point of perfection would be insured. ”

“ It seems to be generally confessed that, of all sciences, that of government, or politics, is the most difficult. In the old world, as far as the lights of history extend, from the earliest ages to our own, we find nations in the constant exercise of all the forms with which the world is at present furnished We have seen among the ancients, as well as the moderns, monarchies, limited and absolute, aristocracies, republics of a single state, and federal unions. ”

“ Still less could any one foresee that these gentlemen would not only agree upon a scheme among themselves, but would actually succeed, without serious civil dissension, in making the people of thirteen states adopt, defend, and cherish it. History afforded no example of such a gigantic act of constructive statesmanship. ”

“ Civil authority and even State control could, in days gone by, only be sustained by plenty of pomp and show. The populace were awed by giant insignia and much parade of power to enforce the authority held. ”

“ As a nation develops in civilisation, or foreign policy, or in specialised ambitions, or in consciousness of nationality, or in peculiar constitutional identity, it has to develop new branches or systems of law, or to borrow them ready-made from nations whose polity is in advance of its own, who have made themselves representative nations in the particular branch of sociology in which it desires to regulate itself. ”

“ Many and subtle are the ideological weapons that the State has wielded through the centuries. One excellent weapon has been tradition. The longer that the rule of a State has been able to preserve itself, the more powerful this weapon; for then, the X Dynasty or the Y State has the seeming weight of centuries of tradition behind it. ”

“ A stern, inflexible, and uniform policy may do for a small compact republic, like one of those of ancient Greece, where there is a unity of character, habits, and interests; but a more accommodating, discriminating, and variable policy must be observed in a vast republic like ours, formed of a variety of states widely differing in habits, pursuits, characters, and climes, and banded together by a few general ties. ”