e discussed either at town
meetings or by the legislature of the State, and which are transmitted
by the press to stimulate the zeal and to excite the interest of
the citizens. This spirit of amelioration is constantly alive in
the American republics, without compromising their tranquillity; the
ambition of power yields to the less refined and less dangerous love of
comfort. It is generally believed in America that the existence and the
permanence of the republican form of government in the New World depend
upon the existence and the permanence of the Federal system; and it is
not unusual to attribute a large share of the misfortunes which have
befallen the new States of South America to the injudicious erection of
great republics, instead of a divided and confederate sovereignty.

It is incontestably true that the love and the habits of republican
government in the United States were engendered in the townships and in
the provincial assemblies. In a small State, like that of Connecticut
for instance, where cutting a canal or laying down a road is a momentous
political question, where the State has no army to pay and no wars to
carry on, and where much wealth and much honor cannot be bestowed upon
the chief citizens, no form of government can be more natural or more
appropriate than that of a republic. But it is this same republican
spirit, it is these manners and customs of a free people, which are
engendered and nurtured in the different States, to be afterwards
applied to the country at large. The public spirit of the Union is, so
to speak, nothing more than an abstract of the patriotic zeal of the
provinces. Every citizen of the United States transfuses his attachment
to his little republic in the common store of American patriotism. In
defending the Union he defends the increasing prosperity of his own
district, the right of conducting its affairs, and the hope of causing
measures of improvement to be adopted which may be favorable to his own
interest; and these are motives which are wont to stir men more readily
than the general interests of the country and the glory of the nation.

On the other hand, if the temper and the manners of the inhabitants
especially fitted them to promote the welfare of a great republic, the
Federal system smoothed the obstacles which they might have encountered.
The confederation of all the American States presents none of the
ordinary disadvantages resulting from great agglomerations