tive power; and when it, by development, became a positive
power, it absorbed all the powers of government, and created the Empire.

There was, indeed, a nearer approach to the division of powers in the
American system, between imperial Rome and her allied or confederated
municipalities. These municipalities, modelled chiefly after that of
Rome, were elective, and had the management of their own local affairs;
but their local powers were not co-ordinate in their own sphere with
those exercised by the Roman municipality, but subordinate and
dependent. The senate had the supreme power over them, and they held
their rights subject to its will. They were formally, or virtually,
subjugated states, to which the Roman senate, and afterward the Roman
emperors, left the form of the state and the mere shadow of freedom.
Rome owed much to her affecting to treat them as allies rather than as
subjects, and at first these municipal organizations secured the
progress of civilization in the provinces; but at a later period, under
the emperors, they served only the imperial treasury, and were crushed
by the taxes imposed and the contributions levied on them by the fiscal
agents of the empire. So heavy were the fiscal burdens imposed on the
burgesses, if the term may be used, that it needed an imperial edict to
compel them to enter the municipal government; and it became, under the
later emperors, no uncommon thing for free citizens to sell themselves
into slavery, to escape the fiscal burdens imposed. There are actually
imperial edicts extant forbidden freemen to sell themselves as slaves.
Thus ended the Roman federative system, and it is difficult to discover
in Europe the elements of a federative system that could have a more
favorable result.

Now, the political destiny or mission of the United States is, in
common with the European nations, to eliminate the barbaric elements
retained by the Roman constitution, and specially to realize that
philosophical division of the powers of government which distinguish it
from both imperial and democratic centralism on the one hand, and, on
the other, from the checks and balances or organized antagonisms which
seek to preserve liberty by obstructing the exercise of power. No
greater problem in statesmanship remains to be solved, and no greater
contribution to civilization to be made. Nowhere else than in this New
World, and in this New World only in the United States, can this
problem b