rnment. This constitution, as Mr. Madison
well observes, divides the powers conceded by the convention to
government between the General Government and the particular State
governments. Strictly speaking, the government is one, and its powers
only are divided and exercised by two sets of agents or ministries.
This division of the powers of government could never have been
established by the convention if the American people had not been
providentially constituted one people, existing and acting through
particular State organizations. Here the unwritten constitution, or
the constitution written in the people themselves, rendered practicable
and dictated the written constitution, or constitution ordained by the
convention and engrossed on parchment. It only expresses in the
government the fact which pre-existed in the national organization and
life.

This division of the powers of government is peculiar to the United
States, and is an effective safeguard against both feudal
disintegration and Roman centralism. Misled by their prejudices and
peculiar interests, a portion of the people of the United States,
pleading in their justification the theory of State sovereignty,
attempted disintegration, secession, and national independence separate
from that of the United States, but the central force of the
constitution was too strong for them to succeed. The unity of the
nation was too strong to be effectually broken. No doubt the reaction
against secession and disintegration will strengthen the tendency to
centralism, but centralism can succeed no better than disintegration
has succeeded because the General government has no subsistentia, no
suppositum, to borrow a theological term, outside or independent of the
States. The particular governments are stronger, if there be any
difference, to protect the States against centralism than the General
government is to protect the Union against disintegration; and after
swinging for a time too far toward one extreme and then too far toward
the other, the public mind will recover its equilibrium, and the
government move on in its constitutional path.

Republican Rome attempted to guard against excessive centralism by the
tribunitial veto, or by the organization of a negative or obstructive
power. Mr. Calhoun thought this admirable, and wished to effect the
same end here, where it is secured by other, more effective, and less
objectionable means, by a State veto on the acts of