Alaska may be so described. The District of Columbia, on which the capital city of Washington is built, is governed directly by Congress. The Territories, which may be described as States in process of formation, have legislatures of their own, and practically full local self-government,-by delegation, however, from the United States as a whole.

The real units of the system are the separate States. They create the governing authorities of the United States. The Territories do not vote in a presidential election, and do not send senators or members to Congress. The thirty-eight States, by various methods of election, evolve the Federal Government. That Government, although on a larger scale, is organised on the same general plan as the Governments of the separate States. In the Federal Government you have the President and his executive, the two Houses of Congress, and the judges. In the State Government you have a presiding officer, known in different States by different names, generally as Governor, the two Houses of the Legislature, and the judiciary. In the Federal Government you have the Constitution of the United States and its amendments; in the State, you have the State Constitution, defining in each case, with more or less minuteness of detail, the powers and provinces of the different authorities. The large Central Government is thus a copy of the small State Government, and the resemblance is carried down to minor details. Thus the Upper House or Senate is distinguished by a longer term of office than the

Lower; the President or Governor has a veto on legislation; the judges are distributed into a Supreme Court, which sits mainly for appeals, and judges of first instance, each of whom has a circuit or district of his own. The courts decide whether legislation is valid, and so on.

It would not be historically correct to say that the State Government is a copy of the Federal Government, because in a sense there were State Governments before there was a Federal Government. It is impossible for a British observer, however, to miss the parallel that State and Federal Government alike presents to the British constitution as it was a hundred years ago, and as it pretends under palpable disguises still to be. A hundred years ago we had a very different distribution of political power, although we still use the same names that were used then. There was more reality in the power of the Crown in those days, and the Upper House of Parliament was of more importance in the state than it is to-day. The founders of the American Republic revolted from the British crown, but not from the principles of the British constitution. So far as their materials and circumstances enabled them, they reproduced the regulations and safeguards, the checks and balances, that were believed to be the special virtue of that constitution. Instead of a hereditary monarch, they had an elective President; instead of a House of Peers, they had an elective Upper House. They adopted the essentials of the British system as it then existed, but in doing

so they inevitably introduced a condition which was wholly new, and to which the difference in the development of the two systems is largely due: they had to commit their constitution to writing. It was a treaty of union for one thing; but what is perhaps more important, it was a new creation. The British constitution, for the most part, exists only in practice and text-books of more or less authority, and in the course of a century it has grown to be a very different thing from the constitution as known to the American colonists. The great feature of that growth has been the overwhelming predominance of the Lower House, before which the separate powers of the Crown and the House of Lords have alike gone down. If there has been any change in the American Constitution it has been in a different direction. The executive in some respects is stronger,* and the Senate is stronger, than they were in the beginning. What we have had of a written constitution has never acquired any special sanctity. The treaty between England and Scotland, and the treaty between Great Britain and Ireland, couched as they are in the language of perpetual validity, have lapsed into the status of ordinary statutes. The Imperial Parliament which was created by them would certainly not scruple to deal with them as it pleased, and nobody, I should imagine, doubts its competence to do so.

The United States, then, is not only a Republic,

* The early Presidents were denied precedence by the Governor of New York.

but is a combination or federation of republics. The "republican form of government," as it is called, is guaranteed to all the constituent parts of the system, and to the system as a whole. Let us examine the larger Republic, which includes and rests upon the rest. We may notice briefly the following points :

1. THE CONSTITUTION of the United States, the charter of this body politic-the Leviathan, as it may be termed. In that document the powers of the United States and its officers must be sought. It is, for its size, perhaps the most important political paper ever penned. It covers only a few printed pages, and numbers, with its amendments, only a few sections. The Constitution defines the province of this Federal Republic; it takes away from the small republics what it gives to the larger one. Certain subjects are defined in a broad and sweeping way as the domain of the Federal power. With these and no others it may deal; over these it is supreme; and the Constitution provides the appropriate machinery-legislative, judicial, and executive for dealing with them.

Short as it is, it has in the course of a century acquired large accretions by judicial interpretation, so that a treatise would be required to expound some of its clauses.

By the theory of the Constitution the Union is a limited republic. The Constitution imposes limitations on the separate States also, as we shall see; but the implication is that the separate States contain the reserve of political power. Whatever is not expressly

taken from them by the Constitution of the United States they retain. They do not hold their existence by delegation from the larger Republic. Even when the Constitution authorises the Republic to make laws on special matters, the State may legislate in default of the Republic. If the Republic chooses to legislate, the State's powers are at an end; but until the Republic acts, the State powers are in full force and effect.

Out of this division of functions flows the source of party government in the United States. The Republican party magnifies the Leviathan's share; the Democratic party stands up for the reserved rights of the separate States. If party government be a blessing, the United States was fortunate in having in the circumstances of its birth material for the creation of an ideally suitable controversy, broad, indefinite, elastic, touching material interests at innumerable points, yet rising to the possibility of conceptions worthy of a great and free people.

It might be thought that, as the Republic derived its existence from the voluntary union of sovereign States, the controversy would inevitably be concluded in favour of the States-right theory, even to the extent of the right of secession, which was claimed by the Southern States twenty-five years ago. We know that the controversy was settled in precisely the contrary way; but it may be remarked here that the argument from the origin of the Union was weakened by the fact that in later times States were admitted on equal terms that