government" might be applied, for, although the population was scattered, the numbers were small enough for the citizens to have a personal knowledge of their leading men, and a personal interest (especially as a large proportion were landowners) in the economy and prudence with which common affairs were managed. Now, however, when of the forty-four States twenty-seven have more than a million inhabitants, and four have more than three millions, the newer States, being, moreover, larger in area than most of the older ones, the stake of each citizen is relatively smaller, and generally too small to sustain his activity in politics, and the party chiefs of the State are known to him only by the newspapers or by their occasional visits on a stumping tour.[1]
All that can be claimed for the Federal system under this head of the argument is that it provides the machinery for a better control of the taxes raised and expended in a given region of the country, and a better oversight of the public works undertaken there than would be possible were everything left to the Central government.[2] As regards the educative effect of numerous and frequent elections, it will be shown in a later chapter that elections in America are too many and come too frequently. Overtaxing the attention of the citizen and frittering away his interest, they leave him at the mercy of knots of selfish adventurers.
The utility of the State system in localizing disorders or discontents, and the opportunities it affords for trying easily and safely experiments which ought to be tried in legislation and administration, constitute benefits to be set off against the risk, referred to in the last preceding chapters, that evils
- ↑ To have secured the real benefits of local self-government the States ought to have been kept at a figure not much above that of their original population, their territory being cut up into new States as the population increased. Had this been done—no doubt at the cost of some obvious disadvantages, such as the diminution of State historical feeling, the undue enlargement of the Senate, and the predominance of a single large city in a State,—there would now be more than two hundred States. Of course in one sense the States are no larger than they were in the early days, because communication from one part to another is in all of them far easier, quicker, and cheaper than it then was.
- ↑ It must be remembered that in most parts of the Union the local self-government of cities, counties, townships, and school districts exists in a more complete form than in any of the great countries of Europe.—See Chapters XLVIII.-LII.post.
