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is the relative weakness of the government of the Union. The principle upon which all confederations rest is that of a divided sovereignty. The legislator may render this partition less perceptible, he may even conceal it for a time from the public eye, but he cannot prevent it from existing; and a divided sovereignty must always be less powerful than an entire supremacy. The reader has seen in the remarks I have made on the constitution of the United States, that the Americans have displayed singular ingenuity in combining the restriction of the power of the Union within the narrow limits of the federal government, with the semblance, and to a certain extent with the force of a national government. By this means the legislators of the Union have succeeded in diminishing, though not in counteracting, the natural danger of confederations.
It has been remarked that the American government does not apply itself to the states, but that it immediately transmits its injunctions to the citizens, and compels them as isolated individuals to comply with its demands. But if the federal law were to clash with the interests and prejudices of a state, it might be feared that all the citizens of that state would conceive themselves to be interested in the cause of a single individual who should refuse to obey. If all the citizens of the state were aggrieved at the same time and in the same manner by the authority of the Union, the federal government would vainly attempt to subdue them individually; they would instinctively unite in the common defence, and they would derive a ready-prepared organization from the share of sovereignty which the institution of their state allows them to enjoy. Fiction would give way to reality, and an organized portion of the territory might then contest the central authority.
The same observation holds good with regard to the federal jurisdiction. If the courts of the Union violated an important law of a state in a private case, the real, if not the apparent contest would arise between the aggrieved state, represented by a citizen, and the Union, represented by its courts of justice.[1]
- ↑ For instance, the Union possesses by the constitution the right of selling unoccupied lands for its own profit. Supposing that the state of Ohio should claim the same right in behalf of certain territories lying within its boundaries, upon the plea that the constitution refers to those lands alone which do not belong to the jurisdiction of any particular state, and consequently should choose to dispose of them itself, the litigation would be carried on in the names of the purchasers from the state of
