The first great compromise answered to the initial difficulty of securing approximate equality of weight in the federal councils between states of unequal size.  The simple device by which this difficulty was at last surmounted has proved effectual, although the inequalities between the states have greatly increased.  To-day the population of New York is more than eighty times that of Nevada.  In area the state of Rhode Island is smaller than Montenegro, while the state of Texas is larger than the Austrian empire with Bavaria and Wuertemberg thrown in.  Yet New York and Nevada, Rhode Island and Texas, each send two senators to Washington, while on the other hand in the lower house each state has a number of representatives proportioned to its population.  The upper house of Congress is therefore a federal while the lower house is a national body, and the government is brought into direct contact with the people without endangering the equal rights of the several states.

The second great compromise of the American constitution consists in the series of arrangements by which sovereignty is divided between the states and the federal government.  In all domestic legislation and jurisdiction, civil and criminal, in all matters relating to tenure of property, marriage and divorce, the fulfilment of contracts and the punishment of malefactors, each separate state is as completely a sovereign state as France or Great Britain.  In speaking to a British audience a concrete illustration may not be superfluous.  If a criminal is condemned to death in Pennsylvania, the royal prerogative of pardon resides in the Governor of Pennsylvania:  the President of the United States has no more authority in the case than the Czar of Russia.  Nor in civil cases can an appeal lie from the state courts to the Supreme Court of the United States, save where express provision has been made in the Constitution.  Within its own sphere the state is supreme.  The chief attributes of sovereignty with which the several states have parted are the coining of money, the carrying of mails, the imposition of tariff dues, the granting of patents and copyrights, the declaration of war, and the maintenance of a navy.  The regular army is supported and controlled by the federal government, but each state maintains its own militia which it is bound to use in case of internal disturbance before calling upon the central government for aid.  In time of war, however, these militias come under the control of the central government.  Thus every American citizen lives under two governments, the functions of which are clearly and intelligibly distinct.