The American Commonwealth. Viscount James Bryce
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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 or Philadelphia via Chicago to San Francisco, though he passes in his journey of three thousand miles over the territories of eleven self-governing commonwealths, hardly notices the fact. He uses one coinage and one post office; he is stopped by no customhouses; 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 Northwestern 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 Government scarcely refers to them. Mr. Freeman in his learned essays, Sir H. Maine in his ingenious book on popular government, pass by phenomena which would have admirably illustrated 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 battleground 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 dogmas of state sovereignty and states’ rights, made practical by the great struggle over slavery, were discussed with extraordinary zeal 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 unmanageable. 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. Of these sources only one, the constitutions, is practically available to an European writer. To be able to use the rest one must go to the state and devote one’s self there to these original authorities, correcting them, where possible, by the recollections of living men. It might have been expected that in most of the states, or at least of the older states, persons would have been found to write political, and not merely antiquarian or genealogical, state histories, describing the political career of their respective communities, and discussing the questions on which political contests have turned. But this was not (except in a very few cases) attempted till near the end of the nineteenth century, so that the European enquirer found a scanty measure of the assistance which he would naturally have expected from previous labourers in this field. I call it a field: it was till lately rather a primeval forest, where the vegetation is rank, and through which even now but few trails have been cut. The new historical school which is growing up at the leading American universities, and has already investigated the colonial period with so much thoroughness, and has now begun to grapple with this task;1 in the meantime, the difficulties I have stated must be my excuse for treating this branch of my subject with a brevity out of proportion to its real interest and importance. It is better to endeavour to bring into relief a few leading features than to attempt a detailed account which would run to inordinate length.
The American state is a peculiar organism, unlike anything in modern Europe, or in the ancient world. The only parallel is to be found in the cantons of Switzerland, the Switzerland of our own day, for until 1815, if one ought not rather to say until 1848, Switzerland was not so much a nation or a state as a league of neighbour commonwealths. But Europe so persistently ignores the history of Switzerland, that most instructive patent museum of politics, apparently only because she is a small country, and because people go there to see lakes and to climb mountains, that I should perplex instead of enlightening the reader by attempting to illustrate American from Swiss phenomena.
Let me attempt to sketch the American states as separate political entities, forgetting for the moment that they are also parts of a federation.
The admission, under a statute of 1910, of two new states2 brought the number of states in the American Union up to forty-eight, varying in size from Texas, with an area of 265,780 square miles, to Rhode Island, with an area of 1,250 square miles; and in population from New York, with over 9,000,000 inhabitants, to Nevada, with 81,000. That is to say, the largest state is much larger than either France or the Germanic Empire; the most populous much more populous than Sweden, or Portugal, or Denmark, while the smallest is smaller than Warwickshire or Corsica, and the least populous less populous than the city of York, or the town of Reading in Berks. Considering not only these differences of size, but the differences in the density of population (which in Nevada is .7 and in Wyoming 1.5 to the square mile, while in Rhode Island it is 508.5 and in Massachusetts 418.8 to the square mile); in its character3 (in South Carolina the blacks are 835,843 against 679,161 whites, in Mississippi 1,009,487 against 786,111 whites); in its birthplace (in North Carolina the foreign-born persons are less than 1/400 of the population, in California, nearly one-third, in North Dakota more than one-half); in the occupations of the people, in the amount of accumulated wealth, in the proportion of educated persons to the rest of the community—it is plain that immense differences might be looked for between the aspects of politics and conduct of government in one state and in another.
Be it also remembered that the older colonies had different historical origins. Virginia and North Carolina were unlike Massachusetts and Connecticut; New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland different from both; while in recent times the stream of European immigration has filled some states with Irishmen, others with Germans or Italians, others with Scandinavians or Poles, and has left most of the Southern states wholly untouched.
Nevertheless, the form of government is in its main outlines, and to a large extent even in its actual working, the same in all these forty-eight republics, and the differences, instructive as they are, relate to the points of secondary consequence.
The states fall naturally into five groups:
The New England states—Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine
The Middle states—New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware,4 Maryland, Ohio, Indiana5
The Southern, or old slave states—Virginia, West Virginia (separated from Virginia during the war), North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico (these two last, however, formed long after the extinction of slavery)
The Northwestern states—Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho
The Pacific states—California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Oregon, Washington
Each of these groups has something distinctive in the character of its inhabitants, which is reflected, though more faintly now than formerly, in the character of its government and politics.
New England is the old home of Puritanism, the traces whereof, though waning under the influence of Irish and French Canadian immigration, are not yet extinct. The Southern states will long retain the imprint of slavery, not merely in the presence of a host of Negroes, but in the backwardness of the poor white population, and in certain attributes, laudable as well as regrettable, of the upper class. The Northwest is the land of hopefulness, and consequently of bold experiments in legislation: its rural inhabitants have the honesty and somewhat limited horizon of agriculturists. The Pacific West, or rather California and Nevada, for Oregon and Washington belong in point of character quite as much to the Northwestern group, tinges the energy and sanguine good nature of the Westerners with a speculative recklessness natural to mining communities, where great