and methods of the Legislatures; then to examine the relations between the Federal or National Government and the State Governments, regarded as a system of Home Rule; and, incidentally, to notice. some characteristics and practices of American politics more or less directly connected with this point of view. The authorities most frequently referred to in the following pages are— A Treatise on the Constitutional Limitations which rest upon The General Principles of Constitutional Law in the United Congressional Government: a Study in American Politics. By HOME RULE. CHAPTER I. GENERAL VIEW OF THE CONSTITUTIONAL THE first glance at the United States reveals a political system remarkably unlike our own. It is not merely that the one is a republic and the other a monarchy; there are far more important points of difference than that. Those which may be described as most immediately obvious are, first, the total separation in the United States of imperial or national from provincial or local authorities-of what is called the Federal power from the State power; secondly, the strict separation of each of the three departments-legislative, executive, and judicial-from and its independence of the others; and thirdly (a consequence of the other two), the absence of any single determinate sovereign body or assembly, or of any real sovereign other than the people themselves. In this country, no doubt, we have something of the same sort as the first two characteristics mentioned. We do not confuse local and imperial business: we do A not combine legislative or executive with judicial functions. We have county government of a sort and town government of a good sort, as distinguished from the general or Imperial Government. The Court of Session and the House of Commons are distinct bodies, and the Speaker of the House has wholly different duties from the Chancellor of the Exchequer. But the existence in this country of an omnipotent Parliament overrides all these distinctions. Throughout the whole British Empire there is one determinate body whose word is constitutionally supreme. That body is Parliament, meaning thereby, in theory, the Crown, Lords, and Commons, and in actual practice and fact, for most things, the House of Commons alone. Parliament habitually abstains from interference in large portions of this Empire; it leaves many of the Colonies to govern themselves; it leaves India to the Governor-General and his clerks. But wherever and The self-govern whenever it speaks, its word is law. ment of our municipalities is a gift from Parliament. The wisdom of the judge is but the breath of Parliament. The Ministry which carries on the imperial business of the country exists but by the favour of Parliament. In the United States there is no such sovereign assembly or combination of assemblies. The President and the two Houses of Congress have no such sovereign power as the Queen, Lords, and Commons. The Government of the United States is confronted in every single State with the Government of that State. Each has its own province, and within that province is independent of the other and excludes the other. And in the government of the United States itself the two Houses of Congress have their own functions, and can control neither the executive nor the judges beyond the limits of the constitution. The President and his Cabinet are not at their mercy, as a British Ministry is at the mercy of the House of Commons. The judges of the United States are not compelled to accept the legislation of Congress as law; on the contrary, if such legislation is beyond the powers of the legislative body, the Supreme Court will declare it null and void, as the Supreme Courts here will annul and disallow an unauthorised bye-law of a railway company or a local corporation. The nearest parallel in this country to the American system is the constitutional system prevailing in the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. There you have a university with its colleges, but the university and the college has, each its own functions and its own officers. The university is not co-extensive with the aggregate of colleges, because it includes halls which are not colleges, and individuals who do not own allegiance to hall or college. The colleges create the ruling power in the university, but they are not subject to it except in special matters. So the United States, as a political system, includes not only the States which create the governing powers, but Territories which are not States, and Districts which are neither States nor Territories. There are thirty-eight States, eight Territories, and two Districts, if the recently acquired |