It makes them feel that to comprehend their supreme instrument of government is a personal duty, incumbent on each one of them. It familiarizes them with, it attaches them by ties of pride and reverence to, those fundamental truths on which the Constitution is based. These are enormous services to render to any free country, but above all to one which, more than any other, is governed not by the men of rank or wealth or special wisdom, but by public opinion; that is to say, by the ideas and feelings of the people at large. In no country were swift political changes so much to be apprehended, because nowhere has material growth been so rapid and immigration so enormous. In none might the political character of the people have seemed more likely to be bold and prone to innovation, because their national existence began with a revolution, which even now lies only a century behind. That none has ripened into a more prudently conservative temper may be largely ascribed to the influence of the famous instrument of 1789, which, enacted in and for a new republic, summed up so much of what was best in the laws and customs of an ancient monarchy. a sort of code, the so-called Law of the Twelve Tables. The existence of this code, which summed up the law in a concise and impressive form, and which had stood almost unmodified for several generations before the need of modifying it began to be felt, caused legal changes -and these necessarily became frequent when the nation had begun to extend its dominions, and to grow in commerce, wealth, and civilization to be made in a cautious and gradual way, here a little and there a little, so that continuity was preserved, failures abandoned, the results of successful experiments secured. Thus development, while slower, became surer and better rooted in the sentiments of the people, who were themselves educated into a reverential regard for the law, and taught to abstain in practice from the imprudent exercise of that power of swift legislation which they all along possessed. CHAPTER XXXVI NATURE OF THE AMERICAN STATE FROM the study of the National government we may go on to examine that of the several 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 office; 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-Western 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, |