The Federal political organization has always tended to confuse to the American mind the relation between democracy and nationality.  The nation as a legal body was, of course, created by the Constitution, which granted to the central government certain specific powers and responsibilities, and which almost to the same extent diminished the powers and the responsibilities of the separate states.  Consequently, to the great majority of Americans, the process of increasing nationalization has a tendency to mean merely an increase in the functions of the central government.  For the same reason the affirmation of a constructive relation between the national and the democratic principles is likely to be interpreted merely as an attempt on the grounds of an abstract theory to limit state government and to disparage states rights.  Such an interpretation, however, would be essentially erroneous.  It would be based upon the very idea against which I have been continually protesting—­the idea that the American nation, instead of embodying a living formative political principle, is merely the political system created by the Federal Constitution; and it would end in the absurd conclusion that the only way in which the Promise of American democracy can be fulfilled would be by the abolition of American local political institutions.

The nationalizing of American political, economic, and social life means something more than Federal centralization and something very different therefrom.  To nationalize a people has never meant merely to centralize their government.  Little by little a thoroughly national political organization has come to mean in Europe an organization which combined effective authority with certain responsibilities to the people; but the national interest has been just as likely to demand de-centralization as it has to demand centralization.  The Prussia of Frederick the Great, for instance, was over-centralized; and the restoration of the national vitality, at which the Prussian government aimed after the disasters of 1806, necessarily took the form of reinvigorating the local members of the national body.  In this and many similar instances the national interest and welfare was the end, and a greater or smaller amount of centralized government merely the necessary machinery.  The process of centralization is not, like the process of nationalization, an essentially formative and enlightening political transformation.  When a people are being nationalized, their political, economic, and social organization or policy is being cooerdinated with their actual needs and their moral and political ideals.  Governmental centralization is to be regarded as one of the many means which may or may not be taken in order to effect this purpose.  Like every other special aspect of the national organization, it must be justified by its fruits.  There is no presumption in its favor.  Neither is there any general presumption against it.  Whether a given function should or should not be exercised by the central government in a Federal system is from the point of view of political logic a matter of expediency—­with the burden of proof resting on those who propose to alter any existing Constitutional arrangement.