Page:James Bryce American Commonwealth vol 1.djvu/344

322 the court cannot stray far from the path which previous decisions have marked out.

X. There are several remarkable omissions in the constitution of the American federation.

One is that there is no grant of power to the National government to coerce a recalcitrant or rebellious State. Another is that nothing is said as to the right of secession. Any one can understand why this right should not have been granted. But neither is it mentioned to be negatived.

The Constitution was an instrument of compromises; and these were questions which it would have been unwise to raise.

There is no abstract or theoretic declaration regarding the nature of the federation and its government, nothing as to the ultimate supremacy of the central authority outside the particular sphere allotted to it, nothing as to the so-called sovereign rights of the States. As if with a prescience of the dangers to follow, the wise men of 1787 resolved to give no opening for abstract inquiry and metaphysical dialectic. But in vain. The human mind is not to be so restrained. If the New Testament had consisted of no other writings than the Gospel of St. Matthew and the Epistle of St. James, there would have been scarcely the less a crop of speculative theology. The drily legal and practical character of the Constitution did not prevent the growth of a mass of subtle and, so to speak, scholastic metaphysics regarding the nature of the government it created. The inextricable knots which American lawyers and publicists went on tying, down till 1861, were cut by the sword of the North in the Civil War, and need concern us no longer. It is now admitted that the Union is not a mere compact between commonwealths, dissoluble at pleasure, but an instrument of perpetual efficacy, emanating from the whole people,