It was that principle of State sovereignty, for which the States seceded, more than the superior resources and numbers of the Government, that caused the collapse of the Confederacy.The numbers were relatively about equal, and the military resources of the Confederacy were relatively not much inferior to those of the Government.So at least the Confederate leaders thought, and they knew the material resources of the Government as well as their own, and had calculated them with as much care and accuracy as any men could.Foreign powers also, friendly as well as unfriendly, felt certain that the secessionists would gain their independence, and so did a large part of the people even of the loyal States.
The failure is due to the disintegrating principle of State sovereignty, the very principle of the Confederacy.The war has proved that united states are, other things being equal, an overmatch for confederated states.
The European states must unite either as equals or as unequals.
As equals, the union can be only a confederacy, a sort of Zollverein, in which each state retains its individual sovereignty; if as unequals, then someone among them will aspire to the hegemony, and you have over again the Athenian Confederation, formed at the conclusion of the Persian war, and its fate.A union like the American cannot be created by a compact, or by the exercise of supreme power.The Emperor of the French cannot erect the several Departments of France into states, and divide the powers of government between them as individual and as united states.They would necessarily hold from the imperial government, which, though it might exercise a large part of its functions through them, would remain, as now, the supreme central government, from which all governmental powers emanate, as our President is apparently attempting, in his reconstruction policy, to make the government of the United States.The elements of a state constituted like the American do not exist in any European nation, nor in the constitution of European society; and the American constitution would have been impracticable even here had not Providence so ordered it that the nation was born with it, and has never known any other.
Rome recognized the necessity of the federal principle, and applied it in the best way she could.At first it was a single tribe or people distributed into distinct gentes or houses; after the Sabine war, a second tribe was added on terms of equality, and the state was dual, composed of two tribes, the Ramnes and the Tities or Quirites, and, afterward, in the time of Tullus Hostilius, were added the Lucertes or Luceres, making the division into three ruling tribes, each divided into one hundred houses or gentes.Each house in each tribe was represented by its chief or decurion in the senate, making the number of senators exactly three hundred, at which number the senate was fixed.Subsequently was added, by Ancus, the plebs, who remained without authority or share in the government of the city of Rome itself, though they might aspire to the first rank in the allied cities.The division into tribes, and the division of the tribes into gentes or houses, and the vote in the state by tribes, and in the tribes by houses, effectually excluded democratic centralism; but the division was not a division of the powers of government between two co-ordinate governments, for the senate had supreme control, like the British parliament, over all matters, general and particular.
The establishment, after the secession of the plebs, of the tribunitial veto, which gave the plebeians a negative power in the state, there was an incipient division of the powers of government; but only a division between the positive and negative powers, not between the general and the particular.The power accorded to the plebs, or commons, as Niebuhr calls them--who is, perhaps, too fond of explaining the early constitution of Rome by analogies borrowed from feudalism, and especially from the constitution of his native Ditmarsch--was simply an obstructive power; and when it, by development, became a positive power, it absorbed all the powers of government, and created the Empire.
There was, indeed, a nearer approach to the division of powers in the American system, between imperial Rome and her allied or confederated municipalities.These municipalities, modelled chiefly after that of Rome, were elective, and had the management of their own local affairs; but their local powers were not co-ordiinate in their own sphere with those exercised by the Roman municipality, but subordinate and dependent.The senate had the supreme power over them, and they held their rights subject to its will.They were formally, or virtually, subjugated states, to which the Roman senate, and afterward the Roman emperors, left the form of the state and the mere shadow of freedom.Rome owed much to her affecting to treat them as allies rather than as subjects, and at first these municipal organizations secured the progress of civilization in the provinces; but at a later period, under the emperors, they served only the imperial treasury, and were crushed by the taxes imposed and the contributions levied on them by the fiscal agents of the empire.So heavy were the fiscal burdens imposed on the burgesses, if the term may be used, that it needed an imperial edict to compel them to enter the municipal government; and it became, under the later emperors, no uncommon thing for free citizens to sell themselves into slavery, to escape the fiscal burdens imposed.There are actually imperial edicts extant forbidden freemen to sell themselves as slaves.Thus ended the Roman federative system, and it is difficult to discover in Europe the elements of a federative system that could have a more favorable result.
