Synopses & Reviews
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV ABSOLUTE POWER, AN AMERICAN INSTITUTION1 THE form of every government and the powers which it may exercise must rest either on the will of the governing authority or the consent of those who are its subjects. Political absolutism may be built up on either of these foundations. It exists whenever those who are governed are for the time under the dominion of a power which they cannot control, and which knows no limits but those of personal discretion. The United States of America were created by the consent of the people of the United States. They were not to be, however, the only subjects of the nationality which they thus constituted. They had the power to make, and they did make, subjects also out of certain States, previously sovereign, independent, and self-governing. The people of each State, acting in concert with the people of all the rest, transferred to the United States part of its former sovereignty, and put it so far under the power of the new nation. This power was limited by the Constitution of the United States, for the time being, to certain mattersparticularly stated. But there was also a provision for further amendments of that instrument, by which the range and scope of federal power might be at any time enlarged. It could never be extended to depriving a State of its equal representation in the Senate, nor for twenty years could it be exercised to suppress the slave trade.1 It could never destroy all the States, because without the States the United States could not exist. It probably could never be a warrant for dividing or consolidating any of the States, without their consent.2 It may also be assumed that the objects of the Constitution could not be varied from those stated in its preamble. 1 In discussing this topic, free use has be...
Synopsis
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