They intended to restrain the impulse of popular majorities, and more especially to prevent the legislature from becoming despotic and tyrannous. But the number of rights which can be effectually protected by the Constitution is very limited; and the legislature must always retain sufficient power to disturb seriously all social relations, if it is determined to make use for this purpose of the means at its command. The utmost that a constitution can be expected to do is to protect directly a small number of vested rights, and to discourage and check indirectly the growth of a demand for radical measures. The power of the general government in Switzerland, as that of the United States, extends not merely to those affairs which are turned over to it by the exact words of the Constitution itself, but also to the relations whose control by the central government appears as a necessity for its performance of the duties devolving upon it. In a comparison of the Swiss Federal polity with that of the United States, it must be borne in mind that the infinite variety in the local and otherwise peculiar circumstances of different nations, produces wide discrepancies between governments bearing a common appellation. There exists, indeed, but little community of opinion or uniformity of practice beyond the circumscribed limits of those maxims in politics which are deducible by direct inference from moral truths. The great mass of those rules and principles which have a more immediate influence on practice, and give to government its tone and peculiar organization, are of a description purely local; deriving their force from local interests, and therefore, however just, are only applicable in their full extent to the particular case. Hence it is that constitutions, nominally and externally the same, have little or no interior resemblance, and in many instances only so far correspond as to justify us in referring them to one common standard. The United States and Switzerland have republican states joined in a republican union, with a division of powers between states and union approximately the same; and they present the most completely developed types of that federalism “which desires union and does not desire unity;” the same problem upon which all civilized peoples have been working ever since civilization began,--how to insure peaceful concerted action throughout the whole, without infringing upon local and individual freedom in the parts; to reconcile the welfare and security of the whole with the local claims and diversified institutions of the component parts. The Swiss Constitution blends these ends harmoniously in a government not too centralized to act in the interest of the localities; but a little too closely wedded to routine to adapt itself to changing conditions. The federative principle implies the existence of opposing tendencies, active within a superior agency, which is capable of regulating their mutual aggression, and of securing their