The Crisis of Eighteen Hundred and Sixty-One in the Government of the United States.: Its Cause, and How It Should Be MetStreight, Abel D.
History
The Crisis of Eighteen Hundred and Sixty-One in the Government of the United States.: Its Cause, and How It Should Be Met
Streight, Abel D.
Secession; United States -- Politics and government -- 1857-1861
"It may be said, that it would tend to render the government of the
Union too powerful, and to enable it to absorb those residuary
authorities which it might be judged proper to leave with the States
for local purposes. Allowing the utmost latitude to the love of power,
which any reasonable man can require, I confess I am at a loss to
discover what temptation the persons entrusted with the administration
of the general government, could ever feel to divest the States of the
authorities of that description. The regulation of the mere domestic
police of a State appears to me to hold out slender allurements to
ambition. Commerce, finance, negotiation, and war seem to comprehend
all the objects which have charms for minds governed by that passion;
and all the powers necessary to those objects ought, in the first
instance, to be lodged in the national depository. The administration
of private justice between the citizens of the same State; the
supervision of agriculture, and of other concerns of a similar nature;
all those things, in short, which are proper to be provided for by
local legislation, can never be desirable cares of a general
jurisdiction. It is, therefore, improbable that there should exist a
disposition in the federal councils to usurp the powers with which
they are connected; because the attempt to exercise them would be as
troublesome as it would be nugatory; and the possession of them, for
that reason, would contribute nothing to the dignity, to the
importance, or to the splendor of the national government."
We will close our extracts from the luminous papers of the "Federalist,"
with the following, premising, however, that, in these fearful times of
raging secession madness, it would be well if the whole two volumes could
be put in the hands of every intelligent individual in the nation. This
extract refers again to the defects and the lamentable inefficiency of the
old confederation, as contrasted with the proposed efficiency and
stability of the government under the new constitution, a subject which
cannot be too deeply engraven upon the mind of every patriot to whatever
party he may belong. It can be found commencing upon page 131, of vol. 1,
of the "Federalist," and ending on page 133:
"Having in the three last numbers taken a summary review of the
principal circumstances and events which depict the genius and fate of
other confederate governments, I shall now proceed in the enumeration
of the most important of those defects which have hitherto
disappointed our hopes from the system established among ourselves. To
form a safe and satisfactory judgment of the proper remedy, it is
absolutely necessary that we should be well acquainted with the extent
and malignity of the disease.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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