may continue in a district, may work injustice to a minority and invite imitation by other States, which, the wholesome stringency of the Central government might have suppressed.
A more unqualified approval may be given to the division of legislative powers. The existence of the State legislatures relieves Congress of a burden too heavy for its shoulders; for although it has far less foreign policy to discuss than the Parliaments of England, France, or Italy, and although the separation of the executive from the legislative department gives it less responsibility for the ordinary conduct of the administration than devolves on those Chambers, it could not possibly, were its competence as large as theirs, deal with the multiform and increasing demands of the different parts of the Union. There is great diversity in the material conditions of different parts of the country, and at present the people, particularly in the West, are eager to have their difficulties handled, their economic and social needs satisfied, by the State and the law. How little Congress could satisfy them appears by the very imperfect success with which it cultivates the field of legislation to which it is now limited.
These merits of the Federal system of government which I have enumerated are the counterpart and consequences of that limitation of the central authority whose dangers were indicated in last chapter. They are, if one may reverse the French phrase, the qualities of Federalism's defects. The problem which all federalized nations have to solve is how to secure an efficient central government and preserve national unity, while allowing free scope for the diversities, and free play to the authorities, of the members of the federation. It is, to adopt that favourite astronomical metaphor which no American panegyrist of the Constitution omits, to keep the centrifugal and centripetal forces in equilibrium, so that neither the planet States shall fly off into space, nor the sun of the Central government draw them into its consuming fires. The characteristic merit of the American Constitution lies in the method by which it has solved this problem. It has given the National government a direct authority over all citizens, irrespective of the State governments, and has therefore been able safely to leave wide powers in the hands of those governments. And by placing the Constitution above
