The American Commonwealth. Viscount James Bryce
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fortunes have rapidly grown and vanished, and into which elements have been suddenly swept together from every part of the world, as a Rocky Mountain rainstorm fills the bottom of a valley with sand and pebbles from all the surrounding heights.
As the dissimilarity of population and of external conditions seems to make for a diversity of constitutional and political arrangements between the states, so also does the large measure of legal independence which each of them enjoys under the federal Constitution. No state can, as a commonwealth, politically deal with or act upon any other state.6 No diplomatic relations can exist nor treaties be made between states,7 no coercion can be exercised by one upon another. And although the government of the Union can act on a state, it rarely does act, and then only in certain strictly limited directions, which do not touch the inner political life of the commonwealth.
Let us pass on to consider the circumstances which work for uniformity among the states, and work more powerfully as time goes on.
He who looks at a map of the Union will be struck by the fact that so many of the boundary lines of the states are straight lines. Those lines tell the same tale as the geometrical plans of cities like St. Petersburg or Washington, where every street runs at the same angle to every other. The states are not areas set off by nature. Their boundaries are for the most part not natural boundaries fixed by mountain ranges, nor even historical boundaries due to a series of events, but boundaries, purely artificial, determined by an authority which carved the national territory into strips of convenient size, as a building company lays out its suburban lots. Of the states subsequent to the original thirteen, California is the only one with a genuine natural frontier, finding it in the chain of the Sierra Nevada on the east and the Pacific Ocean on the west. No one of these later states can be regarded as a naturally developed political organism. They are trees planted by the forester, not self-sown with the help of the seed-scattering wind. This absence of physical lines of demarcation has tended and must tend to prevent the growth of local distinctions. Nature herself seems to have designed the Mississippi basin, as she has designed the unbroken levels of Russia, to be the dwelling place of one people.
Each state makes its own constitution; that is, the people agree on their form of government for themselves, with no interference from the other states or from the Union. This form is subject to one condition only: it must be republican.8 But in each state the people who make the constitution have lately come from other states, where they have lived under and worked constitutions which are to their eyes the natural and almost necessary model for their new state to follow; and in the absence of an inventive spirit among the citizens, it was the obvious course for the newer states to copy the organizations of the older states, especially as these agreed with certain familiar features of the federal Constitution. Hence the outlines, and even the phrases of the elder constitutions reappear in those of the more recently formed states. The precedents set by Virginia, for instance, had much influence on Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida, when they were engaged in making or amending their constitutions during the early part of this century.
Nowhere is population in such constant movement as in America. In some states more than one-fourth of the inhabitants are foreign-born. Many of the townsfolk, not a few even of the farmers, have been till lately citizens of some other state, and will, perhaps, soon move on farther west. The Western states are like a chain of lakes through which there flows a stream which mingles the waters of the higher with those of the lower. In such a constant flux of population local peculiarities are not readily developed, or if they have grown up when the district was still isolated, they disappear as the country becomes filled. Each state takes from its neighbours and gives to its neighbours, so that the process of assimilation is always going on over the whole wide area.
Still more important is the influence of railway communication, of newspapers, of the telegraph. A Greek city like Samos or Mitylene, holding her own island, preserved a distinctive character in spite of commercial intercourse and the sway of Athens. A Swiss canton like Uri or Appenzell, entrenched behind its mountain ramparts, remains, even now under the strengthened central government of the Swiss nation, unlike its neighbours of the lower country. But an American state traversed by great trunk lines of railway, and depending on the markets of the Atlantic cities and of Europe for the sale of its grain, cattle, bacon, and minerals, is attached by a hundred always tightening ties to other states, and touched by their weal or woe as nearly as by what befalls within its own limits. The leading newspapers are read over a vast area. The inhabitants of each state know every morning the events of yesterday over the whole Union.
Finally the political parties are the same in all the states. The tenets (if any) of each party are (with some slight exceptions) the same everywhere, their methods the same, their leaders the same, although of course a prominent man enjoys especial influence in his own state. Hence, state politics are largely swayed by forces and motives external to the particular state, and common to the whole country, or to great sections of it; and the growth of local parties, the emergence of local issues and development of local political schemes, are correspondingly restrained.
These considerations explain why the states, notwithstanding the original diversities between some of them, and the wide scope for political divergence which they all enjoy under the federal Constitution, are so much less dissimilar and less peculiar than might have been expected. European statesmen have of late years been accustomed to think of federalism and local autonomy as convenient methods either for recognizing and giving free scope to the sentiment of nationality which may exist in any part of an empire, or for meeting the need for local institutions and distinct legislation which may arise from differences between such a part and the rest of the empire. It is one or other or both of these reasons that have moved statesmen in such cases as those of Finland in her relations to Russia, Hungary in her relations to the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, Iceland in her relations to Denmark, Bulgaria in her relations to the Turkish sultan, Ireland in her relations to Great Britain. But the final causes, so to speak, of the recognition of the states of the American Union as autonomous commonwealths, have been different. Their self-government is not the consequence of differences which can be made harmless to the whole body politic only by being allowed free course. It has been due primarily to the historical fact that they existed as commonwealths before the Union came into being; secondarily, to the belief that localized government is the best guarantee for civic freedom, and to a sense of the difficulty of administering a vast territory and population from one centre and by one government.
I return to indicate the points in which the legal independence and right of self-government of the several states appears. Each has its own:
Constitution (whereof more anon)
Executive, consisting of a governor, and various other officials
Legislature of two houses
System of local government in counties, cities, townships, and school districts
System of state and local taxation
Debts, which it may (and sometimes does) repudiate at its own pleasure
Body of private law, including the whole law of real and personal property, of contracts, of torts, and of family relations
System of procedure, civil and criminal
Courts, from which no appeal lies (except in cases touching federal legislation or the federal Constitution) to any federal court
Citizenship, which may admit persons (e.g., recent immigrants) to certain privileges of citizens at times, or on conditions, wholly different from those prescribed by other states
Three points deserve to be noted as illustrating what these attributes include.
I. A man gains active citizenship of the United States (i.e., a share in the government of the Union) only by becoming a citizen of some particular state. Being such, he is forthwith entitled to the national franchise. That is to say, voting power in the state carries voting power in federal elections, and however lax a state may be in its grant of such power, e.g., to foreigners just landed or to persons convicted of crime, these state voters will have the right of voting in congressional and presidential elections.9 The only restriction on the states in this matter is