Though the United States alone have those supreme powers, which by political writers are generally called sovereign, the word sovereign has been also used by American writers and politicians in reference to the powers of a State. The people of every State have supreme powers over their own local affairs, their own territory and citizens where the power has not been given to the United States; they can enact laws making the penalty of stealing a pocket-handkerchief or smoking on the street punishable with death and carry them into effect. If they were, however, to make such laws to take effect for past acts, the United States would interfere, because no State can make an _ex post facto_ law. So, in our separate States, a town or a county can run a road through anybody’s land and the State cannot interfere; because the people of the State have given that authority to the town or county. A Board of Health in many States can stop one’s factory, destroy his business, or close his house, by reason of its being deleterious to the general health, and there is no appeal. In these matters the town or county or Board of Health have supreme powers in their jurisdiction; but however supreme or however arbitrary they may be in their jurisdiction, they cannot extend them beyond--these supreme local powers are not sovereign powers. It is a large, local, internal government that each State has over its territory, and the property and the acts of its citizens in that territory. The General Government in our extensive domain, having in addition to the powers it now has those of the States, would from the overwhelming mass of its duties be a failure. Indeed, we find that from necessity Great Britain is on the path of giving to her three kingdoms greater powers of local government. If one examines the bill for home rule for Ireland, proposed in 1886 by the Gladstone administration, he will find that the powers it proposed to give to Ireland are far beyond those our separate States have. Ireland, besides the right of taxing, was empowered to levy duties of customs and excise--that is, the right of protecting her own manufactures to the injury of England’s. Ireland was to pay over specified contributions to the British Government, some millions of pounds annually, for her proportion of the interest on the national debt, and of the cost of the support of the army and navy, and other expenses. If there were a failure in these contributions the General Government would have been obliged to use coercion--a civil war--a policy considered fatally objectionable in the convention that made our Constitution. Ireland also was to lose her representation in the Imperial Parliament.