power to impose federal taxes on the component States and established an Executive furnished with ample means to carry all federal powers into effect through the medium of federal officers.  The government so formed consisted of a President and two elected Houses called Congress, and, as a balance-wheel of the Constitution, a Supreme Court was established, to which was confided the task of deciding in case of dispute all questions arising under the Constitution of the United States or relating to international law.  The Executive of the United States, with the President as its source and head, was furnished with full authority and power to enforce the federal laws.  The army and navy were under its command, and it was provided with courts of justice, and subordinate officers to enforce the decrees of those courts throughout the length and breadth of the Union.  Above all, a complete system of federal taxation supplied the Central Government with the necessary funds to perform effectually all the functions of a supreme national government.

The nature of the Constitution of the United States will be best understood by considering the position in which its subjects stand to the Central Government and their own State Governments.  In effect, every inhabitant of the United States has a double nationality.  He belongs to one great nation called the United States, or, as it would be more aptly called to show its absolute unity, the American Republic, having jurisdiction over the whole surface of ground comprised in the area of the United States.  He is also a citizen of a smaller local and partially self-governing body—­more important than a county, but not approaching the position of a nation—­called a State.

It is no part of the object of this article to enter into the details of the American government, its advantages or defects.  This much, however, is clear—­the American Constitution has lasted nearly one hundred years, and shows no signs of decay or disruption.  It has stood the strain of the greatest war of modern times, and has emerged from the conflict stronger than before.  Even during the war the antagonism of the rebels was directed, not against the Union, but against the efforts of the Northern States to suppress slavery, or, in other words, to destroy, as the Southern States believed (not unjustly as the event showed), their property in slaves, and consequently the only means they had of making their estates profitable.  One conclusion, then, we may draw, that a nation in which the Imperial powers and the State powers are vested in different authorities is no less compact and powerful, as respects all national capacities, than a nation in which both classes of powers are wielded by the same functionaries; and one lesson more may be learnt from the American War of Secession—­namely, that in a nation having such a division of powers, any conflict between the two classes results in the Supreme or Imperial powers prevailing over the Local governmental powers, and not in the latter invading or driving a wedge into the Supreme powers.  In fact, the tendency in case of a struggle is towards an undue centralization of the nation by reason of the encroachment by the Supreme authority, rather than towards a weakening of the national unity by separatist action on the part of the constituent members of the nation.