justice.  When properly used it affords an opportunity for rectifying some injustice for which the ordinary machinery of the law could not provide, or for making such allowances for extraordinary circumstances as the court could not properly consider.  In our country it is too often improperly used to enable the worst criminals to escape due punishment, just because it is a disagreeable duty to hang them.  Such misplaced clemency is pleasant for the murderers, but it makes life less secure for honest men and women, and in the less civilized regions of our country it encourages lynch law. 4.  In all the states except Rhode Island, Delaware, Ohio, and North Carolina, the governor has a veto upon the acts of the legislature, as above explained; and in ordinary times this power, which is not executive but legislative, is probably the governor’s most important and considerable power.  In thirteen of the states the governor can veto particular items in a bill for the appropriation of public money, while at the same time he approves the rest of the bill.  This is a most important safeguard against corruption, because where the governor does not have this power it is possible to make appropriations for unworthy or scandalous purposes along with appropriations for matters of absolute necessity, and then to lump them all together in the same bill, so that the governor must either accept the bad along with the good or reject the good along with the bad.  It is a great gain when the governor can select the items and veto some while approving others.  In such matters the governor is often more honest and discreet than the legislature, if for no other reason, because he is one man, and responsibility can be fixed upon him more clearly than upon two or three hundred.

Such, in brief outline, is the framework of the American state governments.  But our account would be very incomplete without some mention of three points, all of them especially characteristic of the American state, and likely to be overlooked or misunderstood by Europeans.

[Sidenote:  In building the state, the local self-government was left unimpaired.] First, while we have rapidly built up one of the greatest empires yet seen upon the earth, we have left our self-government substantially unimpaired in the process.  This is exemplified in two ways:  first, in the relationship of the state to its towns and counties, and, secondly, in its relationship to the federal government.  Over the township and county governments the state exercises a general supervision; indeed, it clothes them with their authority.  Townships and counties have no sovereignty; the state, on the other hand, has many elements of sovereignty, but it does not use them to obliterate or unduly restrict the control of the townships and counties over their own administrative work.  It leaves the local governments to administer themselves.  As a rule there is only just enough state supervision to harmonize the working of so many