Page:James Bryce American Commonwealth vol 1.djvu/347

 WORKING RELATIONS OF THE NATIONAL AND THE STATE GOVERNMENTS

characteristic feature and special interest of the American Union is that it shows us two governments covering the same ground, yet distinct and separate in their action. It is like a great factory wherein two sets of machinery are at work, their revolving wheels apparently intermixed, their bands crossing one another, yet each set doing its own work without touching or hampering the other. To keep the National government and the State governments each in the allotted sphere, preventing collision and friction between them, was the primary aim of those who formed the Constitution, a task the more needful and the more delicate because the States had been until then almost independent and therefore jealous of their privileges, and because, if friction should arise, the National government could not remove it by correcting defects in the machinery. For the National government, being itself the creature of the Constitution, was not permitted to amend the Constitution, but could only refer it back for amendment to the people of the States or to their legislatures. Hence the men of 1787, feeling the cardinal importance of anticipating and avoiding occasions of collision, sought to accomplish their object by the concurrent application of two devices. One was to restrict the functions of the National government to the irreducible minimum of functions absolutely needed for the national welfare, so that everything else should be left to the States. The other was to give that government, so far as those functions extended, a direct and immediate relation to the citizens, so that it should act on them not through the States but of its own authority and by its own officers. These are fundamental principles whose soundness experience has 325