The American Commonwealth by James Bryce Bryce

Author:James Bryce Bryce
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Commonwealth Pub. Co.
Published: 1908-03-25T05:00:00+00:00

NATUBE OF THE AMERICAN STATE

Fbom the study of the National government we may go on to examine that of the seyeral States which make up the Union. This is the part of the American political system which has received least attention both from foreign and from native writers. Finding in the Federal President, Cabinet, and Congress a government superficially resembling those of their own countries, and seeing the Federal authority alone active in international relations, Europeans have forgotten and practically ignored the State governments, to which their own experience supplies few parallels, and on whose workings the intelligence published on their side of the ocean seldom throws light. Even the European traveller who makes the six or seven days' run across the American continent, from New York via Philadelphia and Chicago to San Francisco, though he passes in this journey of 3,000 miles over the territories of eleven self-governing commonwealths, hardly notices the fact. He uses one coinage and one post ofiBoe; he is stopped by no custom houses; he sees no officials in a State livery; he thinks no more of the difference of jurisdictions than the passenger from London to Liverpool does of the counties traversed by the line of the North-Westem Railway. So, too, our best informed English writers on the science of politics, while discussing copiously the relation of the American States to the central authority, have failed to draw on the fund of instruction which lies in the study of State Governments themselves. Mill, in his Representative Oovemment, scarcely refers to them. Mr. Freeman, in his learned essays,

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Sir H. Maine^ in his ingenious book on Popular Gtoyemment^ pass by phenomena which would have admirably illuBtrated some of their reasonings.

American publicists^ on the other hand, have been too much absorbed in the study of the Federal system to bestow much thought on the State governments. The latter seem to them the most simple and obvious things in the world, while the former, which has been the battle-ground of their political parties for a century^ excites the keenest interest, and is, indeed, regarded as a sort of mystery, on which all the resources of their metaphysical subtlety and legal knowledge may well be expended. Thus, while the dc^mas of State sovereignty and State rights, made practical by the great struggle over slavery, have been discussed with extraordinary acal and acumen by three generations of men, the character, power, and working of the States as separate self-governing bodies have received little attention or illustration. Yet they are full of interest, and he who would understand the changes that have passed on the American democracy will find far more instruction in a study of the State governments than of the Federal Constitution. The materials for this study are, unfortunately, at least to a European, either inaccessible or \mimanageable. They consist of constitutions, statutes, the records of the debates and proceedings of constitutional conventions and legislatures, the reports of officials and commissioners, together with that continuous transcript and picture of current public opinion which the files of newspapers supply.

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