The state is
constituted to nobody's satisfaction; and though all may unite in
boasting its excellences, all are at work trying to alter or
amend it. The work of constituting the state with the English is
ever beginning, never ending. Hence the eternal clamor for
parliamentary reform.
Great Britain and other European states may sweep away all that
remains of feudalism, include the whole territorial people with
the equal rights of all in the state or political people, concede
to birth and wealth no political rights, but they will by so
doing only establish either imperial centralism, as has been done
in France, or democratic centralism, clamored for, conspired for,
and fought for by the revolutionists of Europe. The special
merit of the American system is not in its democracy alone, as
too many at home and abroad imagine; but along with its democracy
in the division of the powers of government, between a General
government and particular State governments, which are not
antagonistic governments, for they act on different matters, and
neither is nor can be subordinated to the other.
Now, this division of power, which decentralizes the government
without creating mutually hostile forces, can hardly be
introduced into any European state. There may be a union of
states in Great Britain, in Germany, in Italy, perhaps in Spain,
and Austria is laboring hard to effect it in her heterogeneous
empire; but the union possible in any of them is that of a Bund
or confederation, like the Swiss or German Bund, similar to what
the secessionists in the United States so recently attempted and
have so signally failed to establish.
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