Year: 1875

| against the nation what it may conceive
to be its rights, while the nation cannot
justly infringe, but is bound to defend
and maintain, the proper rights of the
States.


There are indeed, certain conceded
and traditional conditions of wise and Sc
! cure government in republic, and the
first of them is what is called local self
government, beginning in the neighbor-
hood, the small community, the district,
of which the New England system is the
most striking and satisfactory illustra-
tion. Now to the perfect maintenance
of this condition it is not necessary that
the territorial division known to us as
State of the Union shall be what is called
sovereign. Under our system, indeed,
such division cannot be sovereign, be-
cause in all the great functions of gov
gernment there is confessedly in every
State higher authority than its own.
But the truth is made still more evident
by the fact of which Mr.. Morton remind
ed the soldiers, that of the thirty-seven
States of the Union, the boundaries of
twenty-four were marked out by the Uni
ted States upon its own territory, and
they were by its own act and will admit
ted to exercise the functions of States
under the Constitution. To speak of the
Union as the creation of political COM
munities so established, and to hold that
such States reserve to themselves the
powers which they have granted to the
Union, is nonsense. But if the old States
have a different title to their rights, the
States are not equal in the Union. In
deed, the theory that was plausible eigh-
ty years ago has not only been set aside
by the final decision of arms, but it is an
initiated by the abstract facts of the sit
uation
The fundamental principle of local
self-government, principle which no in


telligent American of any party denies,
is to be maintained not upon any vision
ary theory Of State sovereignty, but upon
grounds of experience and expediency.
If the old colonial divisions and distinc-
tions had never existed, if States lines
had been unknown, it would have been
the highest wisdom to establish them
when we became independent as, in fact,
we have established them in twenty-four
of the thirty-seven States. But to as
sumo that because of that establishment
the immigrant settler in Nevada or Col
orado owes allegiance to the State autho-
rlty, created by the Union, superior to
that which he owes to the Union itself,
is an insanity which is not likely soon to
recur, but which has hitherto frightfully
I-convulsed the country. And that fatal
heresy was carefully cultivated especial
ly in the Southern States, and became
the plea and the pretext of secession.
Before the rebellion the doctrine had
been declared by the Federalists in New
England, although it was hostile to their
most cherished dogma of a strong and eff
fcient general government. But the as
sertion there was transitory, and it ac-
quired little hold. The land of the town
meeting, which knew the immense value
OF local government, knew by the same
instinct which elung to that, the indis-
pensability of the national supremacy.
1t never mistook frigate for a feet.


The part of the country in which the
necessary supremacy of the nation has
been most fully acknowledged is that in
which the true rights of the States have
been most carefully conceded. Thus in
the great debate upon slavery the Slave
States held that the prohibition to-talxe
their slaves in any State, except under
Constitutional guarantees, which was an
extension of the local law of slavery to
every Free State. was a wrong for which
they might seek remedy by dissolving
the Union; but the Free States, while
holding slavery to be curse to human
society and peril to the Union, respect
ed the right of every State to its own To-
cal and municipal law upon the subject.
Again, the Slave States, the lighthouses
of State Sovereignty. declared that they
would impose their State laws upon the
common territory of the United States
or destroy the Union, while the Free
States simply maintained that the COM
mon will must regulate the common do
main. The soundest political philoso-
ply and the truest view of the character
of the American Union have been those
of that part of the country which resisted
the practical effort to maintain State
sovereignty by the destruction of the
Union. This must be evident to intelli-
gent men in the old Slave States, and
they will naturally accept the corollary,
that those who have most truly under
stood the real nature of the government
are those who should administer it.