f instruction.

Whoever wishes to understand the relation of Federalism to the English
Constitution and to English interests must give some attention to the
nature of a Federal Union.

[Sidenote: Characteristics of Federalism.]

A Federal constitution must, from its very nature, be marked by the
following characteristics.

It must, at any rate in modern days, be a written constitution, for its
very foundation is the "Federal pact" or contract; the constitution must
define with more or less precision the respective powers of the central
government, and of the State governments of the central legislature and
of the local legislatures; it must provide some means (e.g., reference
to a popular vote) for bringing into play that ultimate sovereign power
which is able to modify or reform the constitution itself; it must
provide some arbiter, be it Council, Court, or Crown, with authority to
decide whether the Federal pact has been observed; it must institute
some means by which the principles of the constitution may be upheld,
and the decrees of the arbiter or Court be enforced against the
resistance (if need be) of one or more of the separate States. These are
not the accidents but the essential features of any Federal
constitution; and are found under the constitution of the Canadian
Dominion and of the Swiss Confederacy, no less than under the
constitution of the United States. They all depend on the simple, but
often neglected fact, that a Federal constitution implies an elaborate
distribution and definition of political powers; that it is from its
very nature a compromise between the claims of rival authorities, the
Confederacy and the States, and that behind all the mechanism and
artifices of the constitution there lies, however artfully concealed,
some sovereign power which must have the means both to support the
principles of the constitution and, when occasion requires, to modify
its terms. Hence almost of necessity flow some further results. Under a
federation the law of the land must be divided into constitutional laws
(or, in other words, articles of the constitution), which can be
changed, if at all, only with special difficulty, say by an appeal to
the popular vote or by a constituent assembly, and ordinary laws which
may be changed by the central Congress or by the separate assemblies of
the States. The powers both of the central Parliament and of the local
parliaments, depending as they do upon the constitut