Page:James Bryce American Commonwealth vol 1.djvu/370

348 large State are prima facie more likely to be men of high ability than those of a small State, because the field of choice is wider, the competition probably keener. One is reminded of the story of the leading citizen in the isle of Seriphus who observed to Themistocles, "You would not have been famous had you been born in Seriphus," to which Themistocles replied, "Neither would you had you been born in Athens." The two great States of Virginia and Massachusetts reared one half of the men who won distinction in the first fifty years of the history of the Republic. Nevertheless it often happens that a small State produces a first-rate man, whom the country ought to have in one of its highest places, but who is passed over because the Federal system gives great weight to the voice of a State, and because State sentiment is so strong that the voters of a State which has a large and perhaps a doubtful vote to cast in national elections, prefer an inferior man in whom they are directly interested to a superior one who is a stranger.

I have left to the last the gravest reproach which Europeans have been wont to bring against Federalism in America. They attributed to it the origin, or at least the virulence, of the great struggle over slavery which tried the Constitution so severely. That struggle created parties which, though they had adherents everywhere, no doubt tended more and more to become identified with States, controlling the State organizations and bending the State governments to their service. It gave tremendous importance to legal questions arising out of the differences between the law of the Slave States and the Free States, questions which the Constitution had either evaded or not foreseen. It shook the credit of the Supreme court by making the judicial decision of those questions appear due to partiality to the Slave States. It disposed the extreme men on both sides to hate the Federal Union which bound them in the same body with their antagonists. It laid hold of the doctrine of State rights and State sovereignty as entitling a commonwealth which deemed itself aggrieved to shake off allegiance to the national government. Thus at last it brought about secession and the great civil war. Even when the war was over, the dregs of the poison continued to haunt and vex the system, and bred fresh disorders in it. The constitutional duty of