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Thomas Paine, a Massachusetts poet of ci-devant celebrity, petitioned the General Court for permission to call himself Robert Treat Paine, on the ground that he had no Christian name. In New England, Christianity and Federalism were looked upon as intimately connected, and Democracy as a wicked thing, born of Tom Paine, Tom Jefferson, and the Father of Lies.
But their political ideas diverged in many important points. Hamilton was the champion of Federalism, and Jefferson of States' Rights; the one, politically, was an aristocrat, and the other, though born on a plantation, was a democrat. Washington had to use all his tact to keep these statesmen from an open rupture. Their mutual hostility saddened and perplexed him.
Ezekiel shouldered his bundle, trudged off to school, where he lived and studied at the cost of one dollar a week, worked his way to the position of the second lawyer in New Hampshire, and would early have gone to Congress but for his stanch, inflexible Federalism. Daniel Webster, schoolmaster and law-student, was assuredly one of the most interesting of characters.
The way in which this account of the indivisibleness of sovereignty was understood during the revolution, twisted it into a condemnation of the dreaded idea of Federalism. It might just as well have been interpreted to condemn alliances between nations; for the properties of sovereignty are clearly independent of the dimensions of the sovereign unit.
We must strike a new balance in our system of federalism a balance that favors greater responsibility and freedom for the leaders of our State and local governments.
Things are in their nature involved and full of confusion; the complexity of circumstances is such that we lose our way amongst them. Robespierre simplified them to his mind, put good and evil before him in clear and precise formulas. Federalism, indivisibility; unity and indivisibility meant salvation, federalism, damnation.
Moreover, Bolshevism, as it has developed in Russia, is quite peculiarly inapplicable to China, for the following reasons: It requires a strong centralized State, whereas China has a very weak State, and is tending more and more to federalism instead of centralization; Bolshevism requires a very great deal of government, and more control of individual lives by the authorities than has ever been known before, whereas China has developed personal liberty to an extraordinary degree, and is the country of all others where the doctrines of anarchism seem to find successful practical application; Bolshevism dislikes private trading, which is the breath of life to all Chinese except the literati.
The second period was characterized by an almost equally bitter contest between the Democrats and the Whigs in which the Democrats represented a new version of the earlier Republican tradition and the Whigs a resurrected Federalism.
"I have been all my political life preaching in favour of federalism." But he could not consent that the exclusion of Ulster should be prolonged indefinitely pending a settlement on federal lines, nor consent to any "watering down of the powers in the present Home Rule Bill." What remained then, if Ulster would not accept the offer? Nothing but "to proceed calmly with the Bill."
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