1. The Supreme power in the United States is lodged in the general government, with its three branches: Legislative, Executive, and Judicial. The authority of this government, however, is restricted to the powers expressly conferred on it by the Constitution; all other power being reserved to the States, or the people. The States also are sovereign in their own limits, over all questions not expressly assigned to the General Government. Instead of conflict of authority there is true harmony. The people elect the members of both the classes of legislators and executives, and both are equally employed in attending to the interests of the people confided to their care; the first to General, the second to Local interests. All the members and officers of each are the servants of the Sovereign People. 2. As soon as the general government was organized under the Constitution, there arose two parties. One wished to render the General Government prominent in order to secure concentration of strength and vigor of action; the other desired to exalt the State governments in the fear that the general government might prove ambitious of too much power, and disregard the welfare of the people. As in almost all party platforms, both these seemed to take too narrow a view. Washington was held to sympathize more with the first, Jefferson[445] was the acknowledged leader of the second. Together they secured a very fair mingling of both these principles in the administration and general policy of the country. A strict adherence to the meaning and spirit of the Constitution would not seem to give special favor to either, or allow a conflict of interests.
3. The Supreme Court, or the Judiciary, is the regulating, or reconciling element, which the Constitution set over the whole to see that no undue or improper action should defeat its purposes, and that no collisions of authority should occur. Its decision is final, it being the last resort in cases of appeal; and, as the only final and authoritative interpreter of Constitutional Law, it may revise the action of all other branches of both general and local government, and put them in harmony.
4. It is plain that the authors of the Constitution intended to fuse the separate elements, or States, into one whole, where general matters were concerned; and to leave those elements perfectly free and absolute control of all questions involving only their separate and local concerns. The People, and their welfare, are the aim and end of both organizations. The possession of power for ambitious ends by general, State, or municipal organizations, or by individuals, was apparently as foreign to the thought of the whole Constitutional convention of 1787 as it seems always to have been to the mind of Washington. That great man was the leader of clear-sighted and pure-minded statesmen, and whatever weaknesses and faults have existed at any time (and there have always been an abundance of them, as there were in the times of Washington) among political leaders, it must be allowed that the Fathers had worthy sons who knew how to work correctly the problems left them by their predecessors. A single question proved quite unmanageable to the sons, as it had before to the fathers, and had to be settled by an appeal to arms; but it demonstrated the strength of the people and the ability of our institutions to withstand the severest shocks.
5. The original States adopted the............