Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 07.djvu/553

FECHTER.  in 1841 he went with a strolling company to Italy, returning to Paris the same year and entering the Conservatoire with a view to the Théâtre Français. At the same time he studied sculpture, but gave it up for the stage, and in 1844 made his début at the Théâtre Français as Seïde in Voltaire's Mahomet. Afterwards he played in Berlin, and in 1847 took a French company to London. In 1847 he married Mlle. Eléonore Rabut, a French actress of note. (She died in 1895.) From 1848 to 1860 he was the reigning favorite in Paris. He was the original Armand Duval in La dame aux camélias, in which part he won remarkable success. In 1860 he made his first appearance in English drama in London, in Ruy Blas, following with Corsican Brothers, Don César de Bazan, Hamlet, Othello, Bel Demonio, and other plays, among them an adaptation of his own called Rouge et Noir. While not altogether at home on the English stage, Fechter showed himself capable of appreciating the difficulties he had to contend with, and, in some measure, of surmounting them. His impersonation of Hamlet was, upon the whole, one that marked him as an actor of very high powers. For a time he was the lessee of the Lyceum Theatre, playing the chief parts in most of the pieces produced. In 1870 he came to the United States, where, except for a brief return to England two years later, he thenceforward remained. He met with great success as an actor, particularly in Boston; but his imperious temper made him so many enemies that his attempts to manage theatres in both Boston and New York were speedy failures. In 1874, though his first wife was still living, he was married to Lizzie Price, an American actress with whom he had appeared in New York. In 1876, after an accident which somewhat disabled him, he retired to a farm near Quakertown, Pa., where he died. Consult Field, Charles Albert Fechter (Boston, 1882).  FECK′ENHAM, (c.1518-85). The last abbot of Westminster, and the last mitred abbot who sat in Queen Elizabeth's Parliament. He was born in Feckenham Forest, Worcestershire, about 1518, and his family name was Howman. He became a monk at Evesham, and there took the name by which he is now known. He studied at Oxford. After holding other positions, in 1543 he became chaplain to Bonner, Bishop of London, and when the latter was deprived of his see Feckenham was sent to the Tower (1549). Although for much of the time a prisoner, he was active in political matters. Queen Mary released him and made him her chaplain (1553). In 1556 Queen Mary refounded the Benedictine Monastery of Saint Peter, Westminster, London, and made him mitred abbot. Elizabeth was personally friendly to him, but would do nothing for him, as he would not conform to the new (Protestant) faith. All his influence was thrown against the Reformation and its doctrines. In 1559 he was removed, and sent to the Tower in 1560, and, though released on bail in 1574, was practically a prisoner till his death, at Wisbech, near Elyin, 1585.  FECUNDATION (in plants). See .  FEDALMA, Span. pron. . The gypsy's daughter in The Spanish Gypsy, by George Eliot.  FEDERAL GOVERNMENT (Lat. fœderatus, bound by treaty, from fœdus, a treaty). When two or more States, otherwise independent, bind themselves together by a treaty or an organic act so as to present to the external world the aspect of a single State, without wholly renouncing their individual powers of internal self-government, they are said to form a federation. The contracting parties are sovereign States acting through their representatives, and the extent to which the central overrules the local legislature is fixed by the terms of the contract. In so far as the local sovereignty is renounced and the central power becomes sovereign within the limits of the federated States, the federation approaches to the character of a nation; but the only renunciation of sovereignty which a federation, as such, necessarily implies, consists in abandoning the power which each separate State otherwise would possess of forming independent relations with foreign States. “There are,” says J. S. Mill, “two different modes of organizing a federal union. The federal authorities may represent the governments solely, and their acts may be obligatory only on the governments as such, or they may have the power of enacting laws and issuing orders which are binding directly on individual citizens. The former is the plan of the German so-called confederation, and of the Swiss Confederation previous to 1847. It was tried in America for a few years immediately following the War of Independence. The other principle is that of the existing Constitution of the United States, and has been adopted within the last dozen years by the Swiss Confederacy. The Federal Congress of the American Union is a substantive part of the Government of every individual State. Within the limits of its attributions it makes laws which are obeyed by every citizen individually, executes them through its own officers, and enforces them by its own tribunals. This is the only principle which has been found, or which is even likely, to produce an effective federal government. A union between the governments only is a mere alliance, and subject to all the contingencies which render alliances precarious.”

The difference between these two dissimilar forms of federation is aptly described by the terms employed in German political philosophy to differentiate them, and for which we have no equivalent terms in English—Staatenbund, a federation of States, and Bundesstaat, a federated State. The federal governments of antiquity and of the Middle Ages were all of the former type, loosely knit confederacies, like those of Athens and the ephemeral combinations of petty Italian States in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Of a similar character is the union of two or more States under a single monarch, as of Castile and Aragon under Ferdinand and Isabella, Austria and Hungary under Francis Joseph, and of Sweden and Norway under the present Swedish dynasty. Confederations of this character have generally proved to be unstable and of short duration, and none of those at present in existence seems likely to prove an exception to this rule. It is to the more enlightened political consciousness of modern times, and especially to the institution of representative popular governments, that the more durable type of federal government—the federated State—owes