legislatures, judiciary powers. All this goes on, not without collision, but without effort. The Americans have not fancied that they could violate the Teutonic and Christian traditions of their Anglo-Saxon race, nor separate the idea of liberty from the idea of variety. They have not made their institutions as philosophical dreamers. But bringing to the task the experience of the colonist and the practical simplicity of the peasant, they have continued that which succeeded so well with their fathers; what was worth nothing to them they rejected.

They were advised to constitute a deliberative chamber, on the old Roman model, a unitary, and therefore, despotio way two chambers they did create, both emanating from universal suffrage, the one representing the principle of federal union, the other consecrated more particularly to local interests. Each of these branches of legislative power respects the other, without checking it; each has its proper limits, ita determinate circumscription; out of these limits, neither can act. They had not the strange idea of concentrating power in an assembly, that most tyrannic of tyrants. Should either house surpass its powers, the Supreme Court breaks the decree or the law so made. This duality of the American chambers has been the great safe-guard of the country in all the dangers which it has run; has prevented them from blundering legislation, that. is from shaming the sacred character of the law, by violence or passion. What is remarkable is, that in destroying the title of King, and the duration of hereditary power, they have compensated for the relative feebleness of his position by the real power given to the President. His veto, that right of annulling against which such an outery was raised at the commencement of the French Revolution, can repulse any sort of bill from both

houses, unless two-thirds shall take part against the President -a thing almost impossible.

Thus the executive power is joined to the legislative; the Americans not having to dispose of the stable elements of the British-Constitutional Monarchy, have replaced the want of antiquity by energy of action. Hardly a session passes without the use of his right by the President, yet no one is astonished the Americans play fair: habituated by race to the political dice, they are amazed neither at gaining nor losing, provided one plays openly and loyally.

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The Lower House is directly elected; the Upper is chosen at second hand. The House of Representatives is renewed every two years, and now consists of about 230 members; every ten years, after the census, this representation is enlarged. The senators are chosen by the State Legislature, cach of which sends two, precisely as in 1642, when the Provincial league was formed under the monarchy. It is easy to understand this political mechanism, rooted in the Past, and corresponding to the varieties of race, ideas, and customs which distinguished the first colonies. The Lower House represents the nation and the individuals who comprise it; the Upper House, the individual States.

Is the American Government then not one of abstract forms, but a living reality? No: it is the legitimate and inevitable development of the Past; favorable to variety, liberty, and human expansion; nor less favorable to the spirit of family, to Christian cohesion and brotherhood. Just as families assemble in isolated groups to form their bees in the frontier districts; as the subdivided sects and fractions of sects rally under one common banner, so do these two elements of dispersion and concentration, originating in German, Christian tradition, constitute the political mechanism of the United States, and preserve the energetic vitality

of the Union. Every member of the community supports his distinct opinions and interests, manufacturers, planters, Northern men, Southern men, abolitionists, workmen, farmers, capitalists; each opposes his neighbor, and brings to the strife a crazy verbal zeal, little terrible in reality. Every township, every district, county, state, forms a sphere isolated and concentric, all united in the great sphere of the Union. In every one of these circles, they quarrel, but with little peril. There are few inflammatory discourses or tumultuous assemblies, even on election days; they vote in small groups, and in one day all is accomplished. In Vermont, where the principle of dispersion is pushed to the extreme, and where each township used to be represented, it so happened that in one township there were found but three electors-father, son, and servant, "who," says Mr. Mackay,

mutually elected each other; the father to represent the interests of property, the son the rights of the future, and the domestic the rights of labor."

Thus political life is not an universal fever, and does not act by furious fits. Occupying little time and little space, it does not prevent the farmer from cultivating his lands, nor the woodcutter from using his axe; a man is a member of the community precisely as he is father, son, or husband, without ceasing his ordinary occupations to be so. A thousand personal and local considerations; a thousand peculiar interests arm one man against the tariff, another for it; one for slavery, another for the agricultural interest-question, sub-divided and localized usque ad infinitum, these interest only fractions of the. community. A man is a politician in his district, who is never in his county, and who will never see Washington; and, finally, the moment that the central legislature takes up an agitating question, the movement ceases in the provinces, and no matter how violently the blood may boil at the heart,

the pulsations growing feeble as they reach the extremities lose all power to disturb the regular and normal life.

Such is the federative harmony of this grand whole which you would strive in vain to bring to imperial or monarchical unity. Having as political elements only family groups scattered over an immense continent, the Americans proceed by the powerful self-concentration of each group, a system which the Union has well substituted for a centralization which would destroy it. I imagine a purely central movement in a society of so many million souls habituated to variety of active and free personal exercise of their will, would open a gulf that would swallow up all.

Social life, monarchical or republican, is only a varied harmony which concentrates on a certain number of points, its normal and. regular forces, and balances them by one another.

Excessive dispersion or excessive concentration would destroy the social body. Some Americans fear one of these, others are alarmed for the other. Hence their great fundamental division into whig and democrat. The democrats, (which word is not to be taken in its European sense), oppose all centralization; go for dispersion; want the annexation of other countries, Canada, Mexico; and will never rest until all North America be one great hive, with its separate cells.

"Instead of calling themselves democrats," says Channing, "a word which has no meaning in modern language, they should be named disseminators." They preach the division of the Union into small groups, into concentric spheres, which shall effectually absorb all the surrounding force to give it sail again energetically. They represent mobility, activity, change; they willingly oppose capital and its holders, especially manufacturing capital. Men of action, they further war, and

are not particular about ideal or theoretic equity. Once in motion, they cannot be arrested even by a certain amount of injustice. It is they who show least. courtesy to foreign nations," and I think," says Mackay, "that they would not hesitate to violate the constitution." This party is the symbol of extreme will and of ardent life. The invasions of Texas and Mexico, political crimes, were earnestly and unanimously supported by this party.

What makes its strength, is the Puritan element, which in many circumstances it possesses, and that need of popular aggrandisement, of warlike conquest, and of hardy passion which characterises the third epoch of America, and which is now. To consolidate the Central Government, and to oppose dispersion, is Whig politics. Such are nearly all moneyed men, manufacturers, capitalists, large proprietors; it is they who instinctively supported the National Bank, attacked by President Jackson; it is they who fight for the interests of capital in opposition to those of labor, especially of agricul tural labor. Twenty other questions-slavery, manufactures, railroads, come into these opposed polities. In subsidiary questions, democrats and whigs mingle or become individually independent. Some Pennsylvania democrats join the whigs in the commercial question, while some of the Western whigs lean to the opinion of their adversaries on that topic.

At the extremity of the whig party are found those who defend capital at all hazards, the gentlemen; at the extremity of the democratic party, the nullifiers, who wish to give to each State the power of nullifying an act of Congress; there are also separatists who hold to a right to quit the Union when they please. These last tend toward the total destruction of the Union. The whigs call their adversaries loco-foco, from an accident which happened in one of their meetings;