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Updated: May 4, 2025
By this means the legislators of the Union have succeeded in diminishing, though not in counteracting, the natural danger of confederations. It has been remarked that the American government does not apply itself to the states, but that it immediately transmits its injunctions to the citizens, and compels them as isolated individuals to comply with its demands.
Independent nations have therefore a natural tendency to centralization, and confederations to dismemberment. It now only remains for us to apply these general principles to the American Union. The several states were necessarily possessed of the right of regulating all exclusively provincial affairs.
Many pages might be filled with like principles expressed and followed by the "barbarians." One feature more of the old village communities deserves a special mention. It is the gradual extension of the circle of men embraced by the feelings of solidarity. Not only the tribes federated into stems, but the stems as well, even though of different origin, joined together in confederations.
In order to enable the federal government easily to conquer the resistance which may be offered to it by any one of its subjects, it would be necessary that one or more of them should be especially interested in the existence of the Union, as has frequently been the case in the history of confederations.
In all the confederations which had been formed before the American constitution of 1789, the allied states agreed to obey the injunctions of a federal government: but they reserved to themselves the right of ordaining and enforcing the execution of the laws of the Union.
At the approach of a great danger, these tribes might consent to coalesce and to form alliances, or even confederations; but the federal tie, never one of much tenacity, and rarely capable of holding its ground in the presence of monarchic vigor, was here especially weak.
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