Federal Governments Tends Towards Separation of Its Members Rather Than Tyranny Over Them

A further objection: laws for individual citizens would leave the union too strong, able to swallow the powers left with the states. Grant federal officers the fullest love of power; I see no temptation there. A state’s domestic police holds little charm for ambition. Commerce, finance, negotiation, and war hold every charm, and those powers belong first to the nation. Private justice between neighbors, and farming, can never tempt a general jurisdiction. Usurpation is therefore unlikely; the attempt would be hard, useless, and add nothing to the union’s splendor.

Suppose mere lust for power bred that appetite. The people who choose the union’s lawmakers would still check it. States can encroach on the union far more easily than the union on the states. The proof is the greater sway a state holds over its people when it governs justly and wisely. All federal constitutions are weak this way; give them every force liberty allows. That sway comes partly from how the union is spread out, chiefly from what the states govern.

Human affection grows weak as its object grows distant or diffuse. A man is more attached to his family than to his neighborhood, and to his neighborhood than to the whole community. On the same principle, each state’s people lean toward their local government, unless the union governs far better.

That leaning finds allies in the small interests the states manage, streams of sway through society. One advantage settles the matter: the everyday work of criminal and civil justice. No source of popular obedience and attachment is stronger or wider. As the visible guardian of life and property, it wins affection, esteem, and reverence for government. This great cement of society runs almost wholly through state channels. It gives the states so firm a hold that they always balance the union, and often prove dangerous rivals.

The union’s work falls less under most citizens’ eyes; speculative men chiefly see its gains. Touching only broad interests, it stirs less duty and attachment. Every federal constitution we know confirms this. The feudal systems, though not strictly confederacies, shared their nature. A common head ruled the nation, and each great vassal was a kind of sovereign. The barons warred on the crown and on each other; the head was too weak to keep the peace. In general the barons won, and many fiefs became states of their own.

The separate governments in a confederacy are like those baronies. But they hold the people’s trust and can resist every federal encroachment. It will be well if they cannot also block the union’s rightful authority. The likeness lies in rivalry of power, and in strength gathered into a few depositories: men there, political bodies here. Neglect of this doctrine bred our political mistakes and turned our jealousy the wrong way. A review of confederate governments follows.

The chief confederacy of antiquity joined the Greek republics under the Amphictyonic council, a close parallel to our Confederation. Its members stayed sovereign states with equal votes in the federal council. The council could resolve whatever it judged necessary for Greece’s common welfare. It could declare and wage war, judge members’ disputes as a final court, and fine the aggressor. It could turn its whole force on the disobedient, and admit new members. On paper these powers seem ample, and in several ways exceed our Articles of Confederation. The Amphictyons commanded the superstition of the age, a chief engine of government, and were sworn to coerce defiant cities.

Yet practice differed from theory. These powers, like our Congress’s, were wielded by deputies the cities appointed. They reached those cities alone. Hence the confederacy’s weakness, its disorders, and finally its ruin. The more powerful members, far from being kept in awe, tyrannized in turn over all the rest. Athens was master of Greece seventy-three years, Sparta the next twenty-nine, Thebes after Leuctra. Too often, Plutarch says, deputies of the strong overawed and bribed the weak, and judgment favored the powerful. Even in defensive wars against Persia and Macedon the members never acted in concert. Some were always dupes or hirelings of the enemy.

After the war with Xerxes, Sparta moved to expel several unfaithful cities. Athens defeated her. The episode shows the union’s weakness, its strongest members’ ambition and jealousy, and the dependence of the rest. Had the Greeks been as wise as brave, says the Abbe Milot, the peace after Persia would have brought a closer union. Instead Athens and Sparta, puffed up by victory, became rivals and then enemies, harming each other worse than Xerxes had. Their jealousies and hatreds ended in the Peloponnesian War, which ruined and enslaved the Athenians who began it.

A weak government at peace is always shaken by quarrels within. These never fail to bring calamities from abroad. When the Phocians plowed ground sacred to Apollo, the council fined them. Backed by Athens and Sparta, they refused. The weaker cities that upheld the Amphictyons’ cause called in Philip of Macedon. He had secretly nursed the quarrel and long plotted against Greek liberty. By intrigue and bribes he won the popular leaders of several cities. Their votes gained him a seat on the council, and his arms made him master of the confederacy.

Such were the fruits of the false principle on which that body was founded. Had Greece been bound by a stricter confederation and held to it, says a shrewd observer, she would never have worn Macedon’s chains. She might have barred the vast projects of Rome. The Achaean league, another society of Greek republics, has much to teach us. Its union was far closer, and its plan far wiser. It met a like fate, but by no means equally deserved it.

The league’s cities kept their local jurisdiction, appointed their own officers, and enjoyed perfect equality. Their senate alone could make peace and war, send and receive ambassadors, and enter treaties and alliances. It named a chief magistrate, or praetor, who commanded the armies and, with ten senators, governed in recess. The cities had the same laws, weights, measures, and money, being in a manner compelled to them. When Philopoemen brought Sparta in, the laws of Lycurgus gave way to the Achaeans’. The Amphictyonic confederacy had left her self-governing. That alone marks a real difference in spirit.

Few records of the league survive; could its workings be known, it would teach more of federal government than any like experiment. Every historian attests one fact: the league showed more moderation and justice, and less violence and sedition, than any city that held its sovereignty alone. Popular government, so stormy elsewhere, bred no such disorders there, says the Abbe Mably, because the confederacy’s general authority and laws tempered it. We should not conclude that faction never stirred the cities, much less that harmony reigned in the whole system. The republic’s fate shows otherwise.

Under Macedon’s later kings the arts of division dissolved the league, and its cities fell to garrisons or usurpers. Shame and oppression woke their love of liberty; the league soon embraced almost all Peloponnesus. All Greece seemed ready to join, until Sparta and Athens, jealous of Achaean glory, chilled it. Attacked by Cleomenes of Sparta, the Achaeans begged aid from Macedon, their old oppressor. A powerful ally, they learned, is but another name for a master. Against Philip’s tyrannies they called in Rome, which fed their quarrels and bought leaders like Callicrates. She lured cities away, telling them the league violated their sovereignty. This union, the last hope of ancient liberty, was torn to pieces, and Achaia loaded with chains.

I have thought it worth sketching the outlines of this important stretch of history. It teaches more than one lesson. It is also a supplement to the outline of the Achaean constitution. Above all it shows how federal bodies tend to anarchy among the members rather than tyranny in the head.

Ancient confederacies do not exhaust our experience; living governments on the same principle deserve notice, first the Germanic body. Charlemagne drew Germany into his empire; when his sons divided it, this part stood alone. But the chief vassals, their fiefs now hereditary, threw off the yoke and became sovereigns. Imperial power could neither restrain them nor keep peace. Emperors held full sovereignty in the eleventh century; by the fifteenth, little more than its symbols.

This feudal system yielded the Germanic one. A diet represents the members. The emperor is executive magistrate, with a veto on the diet’s decrees. Two courts, the imperial chamber and the aulic council, judge disputes. The diet legislates, makes war and peace, forms alliances, assesses quotas of troops and money, and regulates coin. It may also ban a disobedient member, stripping his sovereign rights and lands. Members may not tax mutual trade without leave, debase money, wrong one another, or shelter disturbers of the peace.

The emperor alone may propose to the diet and veto its resolutions. He names ambassadors, confers dignities and titles, fills electorates, and founds universities. He receives and spends the public revenues and guards the public safety. For all this parade of powers, the empire is no exception. It is a community of sovereigns; its diet represents sovereigns; its laws are addressed to sovereigns. That principle leaves it a nerveless body: unable to govern its members, defenseless abroad, shaken by ceaseless ferment within.

Germany’s history is one of wars: emperor against princes and states, and these against each other. The strong are licensed, the weak oppressed; foreigners intrude and intrigue. Requisitions of men and money were ignored or half met; attempts to enforce them failed or ended in slaughter. Before the Peace of Westphalia a war of thirty years laid Germany waste. Foreign powers dictated that peace, and its articles, to which they are parties, are fundamental to the Germanic constitution.

Even united by an emergency of self-defense, the nation is wretched. Preparations wait on tedious debates, bred of the jealousies, pride, and clashing claims of sovereign bodies. The enemy takes the field before the diet acts, and winters before the troops are ready. The small peacetime army is poorly kept, badly paid, full of local prejudice, and funded by irregular, unequal sums.

Unable to keep order among sovereign subjects, the empire made nine or ten circles to enforce its laws by arms against defiant members. The experiment only showed the radical vice more plainly. The circles either fail their commissions or execute them with all the havoc of civil war. Whole circles sometimes default, worsening the mischief they were made to cure. Thuanus gives a sample: when Donawerth fell under the ban, the Duke of Bavaria was sent to enforce it. He came with ten thousand troops, seized the city in his own name, and annexed it.

What has kept this disjointed machine from flying apart? Most members are weak, unwilling to lie at foreign powers’ mercy. Even the chief members are weak beside the great powers around them. The emperor draws vast weight from his own hereditary dominions. He has an interest in a system that flatters his family pride and makes him Europe’s first prince. These prop a feeble and precarious union. The repellent quality in sovereignty, stronger with time, blocks any reform by proper consolidation.

Poland, a government over local sovereigns, is a more direct case. Unfit alike for self-government and self-defense, it has long lain at the mercy of powerful neighbors. They have lately had the mercy to relieve it of a third of its people and territory. The Swiss cantons’ tie scarcely amounts to a confederacy, though it is cited as proof such bodies last. They have no common treasury, no common troops even in war, no common coin, no common court, no other common mark of sovereignty.

Geography holds them together, with their weakness, their smallness, and fear of powerful neighbors. Few things divide a people of such simple and similar manners, and they share an interest in their dependent possessions. They need mutual aid against insurrections, and a settled way to end disputes. Each party at odds picks four judges from the neutral cantons, who choose an umpire if they split. All the cantons must enforce that tribunal’s final sentence.

So far as their case compares with ours, it confirms the principle I mean to establish. Whatever force the union had in ordinary cases, it failed the moment a serious difference tested its strength. Religious disputes, three times kindling bloody contests, may be said in fact to have severed the league. The Protestant and Catholic cantons now hold separate diets for the weightiest matters, leaving the general diet little to do. That separation produced opposite foreign alliances: Berne, heading the Protestants, with the United Provinces; Luzerne, the Catholics, with France.

The United Netherlands is a confederacy of republics, or rather of aristocracies. It confirms every lesson we have drawn. Seven equal, sovereign provinces compose it, each a body of equal, independent cities. In all important cases the provinces must agree, and so must the cities. The States-General is about fifty deputies the provinces appoint. It may make treaties, war and peace, raise armies and fleets, and set quotas. All of it needs unanimity and their constituents’ consent.

The union’s executive magistrate is the stadtholder, now a hereditary prince. His weight comes from that independent title, his great estates, and his ties to European rulers. Above all, he is stadtholder in each province too. For the union he settles disputes between provinces when other means fail. He receives foreign ambassadors and commands a standing army of forty thousand men.

Such is the Belgic confederacy on parchment. What has practice stamped upon it? Weakness in government; discord among the provinces; foreign influence and insults; a shaky peace, and great harm in war. The union of Utrecht seems to give the States-General power enough to keep harmony. Provincial jealousy makes the practice very different.

The constitution obliges each province to levy contributions. The inland provinces have little trade and cannot pay an equal quota. So the article never could be executed, and probably never will. In practice they waive the constitution. The willing provinces pay at once, then recover from the rest as they can. More than once the unpaid quotas have been collected at bayonet point. That is possible, though dreadful, where one member outweighs the rest. It is impossible where several members are equal, each able to mount a long, hard defense.

In emergencies the States-General are often forced beyond their constitutional bounds. Even the recent peace with Great Britain set aside the rule of unanimity. A weak constitution must end in one of two ways. It collapses for want of proper powers, or it usurps the powers public safety demands. Tyranny has perhaps grown more often from powers seized under a weak constitution than from the fullest lawful ones.

The stadtholder has caused great harm, yet many suppose that without his influence in the provinces the confederacy’s anarchy would long ago have dissolved it. The Abbe Mably calls him the spring that quickens the provinces and makes them think alike. The powers around them also force some degree of union. Yet their intrigues feed the constitutional vices that keep the republic always somewhat at their mercy.

The true patriots have long mourned these vices. Four times they have called special assemblies to find a remedy. Each time their zeal has failed to unite the public councils in reforming evils all admit. This unhappy people seem now to face the crisis of their destiny: convulsions at home, discord among the states, and foreign invasion.

I make no apology for dwelling so long on these precedents. Experience is the oracle of truth. Where its answers are clear, they ought to be conclusive and sacred. Here is what it says. A sovereignty over sovereigns, a government over governments, a legislation for communities rather than individuals, is a mistake in theory and ruinous in practice. It subverts civil society, putting violence in the place of law, the sword in the place of the magistrate.