Page:The American Democrat, James Fenimore Cooper, 1838.djvu/28

22 meaning of the word. The constitution leaves the real character of the institutions of the country, with the exception that it prohibits monarchies, to be settled by the several states themselves.

On the other hand, too much importance is attached to what is called the reserved sovereignties of the several states. A community can hardly be termed sovereign at all, which has parted with all the great powers of sovereignty, such as the control of foreign relations, the authority to make war and peace, to regulate commerce, to coin money, keep fleets and armies, with all the other powers that have been ceded by the states to the federal government. But, admitting that the rights reserved are sovereign in their ordinary nature, they are scarcely so in the conditions under which they are enjoyed, since, by an amendment of the constitution, a state may be deprived of most of them, without its own consent. A community so situated can scarcely be deemed sovereign, or even independent.

The habit of drawing particular inferences from general theories, in matters as purely practical as those of government, is at all times dangerous, and the safest mode of construing the constitution of the United States, is by looking only at the instrument itself, without adverting to other systems, except as they may serve to give the proper signification of the terms of that instrument, as these terms were understood at the time it was framed.

Many popular errors exist on the subject of the influence of the federal constitution on the rights and liberties of the citizen. The rights and liberties of the citizen, in a great degree, depend on the political institutions of the several states, and not on those of the Union. Many of these errors have arisen from mistaking the meaning of the language of the