Page:Studies in constitutional law Fr-En-US (1891).pdf/161

Rh every line of the Constitution, we see the States trying to take back in detail what they had granted wholesale to the national element. They dispute and cavil over every clause, they are supported throughout the course of these debates over small details by an immense force of popular feeling. The Constitution of 1787–89 left the separate States standing side by side with the federal powers which it created. The States have each continued to live their own separate life; they look with suspicion upon one another and group themselves into rival factions. The States, by an act of prudent self-abnegation, created a superior authority, and the rival factions, have each in their turn, either used it as a means for securing their own domination, or look upon it as a rock of offence. The political history of the United States for more than half a century is almost entirely the thethe [sic] story of a struggle, full of incidents, between these great organized powers, which existed before the Constitution and up to a certain point independently of it. Nowadays a long common life has strengthened the feeling of national unity. The War of Secession has raised, emboldened, and exalted the federal power. But up to 1860, we may say that the Constitution, except in appearance, and in the sight of foreign nations, scarcely upheld the unity and sovereignty of the American nation. The States had existed so long before the Constitution that they were not willing to acknowledge its paramount authority, and but too often they used the organs of national authority which they had created as instruments ready at hand for the promotion of their own objects.