of sovereign power.  The people cannot act daily as the people.  They must establish a government, and invest it with so much of the sovereign power as the case requires; and this sovereign power being delegated and placed in the hands of the government, that government becomes what is popularly called THE STATE.  I like the old-fashioned way of stating things as they are; and this is the true idea of a state.  It is an organized government, representing the collected will of the people, as far as they see fit to invest that government with power.  And in that respect it is true, that, though this government possesses sovereign power, it does not possess all sovereign power; and so the State governments, though sovereign in some respects, are not so in all.  Nor could it be shown that the powers of both, as delegated, embrace the whole range of what might be called sovereign power.  We usually speak of the States as sovereign States.  I do not object to this.  But the Constitution never so styles them, nor does the Constitution speak of the government here as the general or the federal government.  It calls this government the United States; and it calls the State governments State governments.  Still the fact is undeniably so; legislation is a sovereign power, and is exercised by the United States government to a certain extent, and also by the States, according to the forms which they themselves have established, and subject to the provisions of the Constitution of the United States.

Well, then, having agreed that all power is originally from the people, and that they can confer as much of it as they please, the next principle is, that, as the exercise of legislative power and the other powers of government immediately by the people themselves is impracticable, they must be exercised by REPRESENTATIVES of the people; and what distinguishes American governments as much as any thing else from any governments of ancient or of modern times, is the marvellous felicity of their representative system.  It has with us, allow me to say, a somewhat different origin from the representation of the commons in England, though that has been worked up to some resemblance of our own.  The representative system in England had its origin, not in any supposed rights of the people themselves, but in the necessities and commands of the crown.  At first, knights and burgesses were summoned, often against their will, to a Parliament called by the king.  Many remonstrances were presented against sending up these representatives; the charge of paying them was, not unfrequently, felt to be burdensome by the people.  But the king wished their counsel and advice, and perhaps the presence of a popular body, to enable him to make greater headway against the feudal barons in the aristocratic and hereditary branch of the legislature.  In process of time these knights and burgesses assumed more and more a popular character, and became, by degrees, the guardians