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Updated: May 31, 2025
The particular governments are stronger, if there be any difference, to protect the States against centralism than the General government is to protect the Union against disintegration; and after swinging for a time too far toward one extreme and then too far toward the other, the public mind will recover its equilibrium, and the government move on in its constitutional path.
Following the line of least resistance, as throughout his long reign, he inclined now to federalism, now to centralism, and he was still experimenting when the war of 1866 broke out. For Austria this war was decisive, for its results were her final expulsion both from Germany and from Italy, and the creation of that fatal Dual System which has distorted her whole subsequent development.
The civil war has vindicated the Union, and defeated the armed forces of the State sovereignty men; but it has not refuted their doctrine, and as far as it has had any effect, it has strengthened the tendency to consolidation or centralism.
Now, the political destiny or mission of the United States is, in common with the European nations, to eliminate the barbaric elements retained by the Roman constitution, and specially to realize that philosophical division of the powers of government which distinguish it from both imperial and democratic centralism on the one hand, and, on the other, from the checks and balances or organized antagonisms which seek to preserve liberty by obstructing the exercise of power.
This may, indeed, be changed, but only to substitute for imperial centralism democratic centralism, which were no improvement, or to go back to the system of antagonisms, checks and balances, called constitutionalism, or parliamentary government, of which Great Britain is the model, and which were a return toward barbarism, or mediaeval feudalism.
As a nation, too, Mexico had been guilty of many acts of violence toward the United States, which furnished themes for those politicians who were interested in bringing on a war between the two countries. The attempt to enforce Centralism on Texas, which contained many Americans, increased the ill-will toward Mexico.
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.
These confrontations and contradictions created three sets of political problems: centralism versus localism; established central authority versus provincial rights and self-determination; the concentration or centralization of authority in the hands of a select few civilian and/or military leaders, responsible to the central authority, who made on the spot decisions and took action.
There was no first magistrate, no supreme court, no commander-in-chief, no exclusive mint nor power of credit, no national taxation, no central house of representation and legislation, no senate. Unfortunately it had one church, and out of this single matrix of centralism was born more discord than had been produced by all the centrifugal forces of provincialism combined.
Great Britain and other European states may sweep away all that remains of feudalism, include the whole territorial people with the equal rights of all in the state or political people, concede to birth and wealth no political rights, but they will by so doing only establish either imperial centralism, as has been done in France, or democratic centralism, clamored for, conspired for, and fought for by the revolutionists of Europe.
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