And if we look further, considering the danger of concentration of power in irresponsible hands, we see a new cause for alarm in undue federal mastery and interference.  This we can only resist by the constant assertion of the rights, the power, the dignity of the individual State, all that it has not surrendered in the fundamental constitution of the Republic.  This means the full weight of the State, as a State, as a political unit, in the election of President; and the full weight of the State, as a State, as a political unit, without regard to its population, in the senate of the United States.  The senate, as it stands, as it was meant to be in the Constitution, is the strongest safeguard which the fundamental law established against centralization, against the tyranny of mere majorities, against the destruction of liberty, in such a diversity of climates and conditions as we have in our vast continent.  It is not a mere check upon hasty legislation; like some second chambers in Europe, it is the representative of powers whose preservation in their dignity is essential to the preservation of the form of our government itself.

We pursue the same distribution of power and responsibility when we pass to the States.  The federal government is not to interfere in what the State can do and ought to do for itself; the State is not to meddle with what the county can best do for itself; nor the county in the affairs best administered by the town and the municipality.  And so we come to the individual citizen.  He cannot delegate his responsibility.  The government even of the smallest community must be, at least is, run by parties and by party machinery.  But if he wants good government, he must pay as careful attention to the machinery,—­call it caucus, primary, convention, town-meeting,—­as he does to the machinery of his own business.  If he hands it over to bosses, who make politics a trade for their own livelihood, he will find himself in the condition of stockholders of a bank whose directors are mere dummies, when some day the cashier packs the assets and goes on a foreign journey for his health.  When the citizen simply does his duty in the place where he stands, the boss will be eliminated, in the nation, in the State, in the town, and we shall have, what by courtesy we say we have now, a government by the people.  Then all the way down from the capital to the city ward, we shall have vital popular government, free action, discussion, agitation, life.  What an anomaly it is, that a free people, reputed shrewd and intelligent, should intrust their most vital interests, the making of their laws, the laying of their taxes, the spending of their money, even their education and the management of their public institutions, into the keeping of political bosses, whom they would not trust to manage the least of their business affairs, nor to arbitrate on what is called a trial of speed at an agricultural fair.