e supreme power of
the nation only affects a few of the chief interests of society; it
represents an immense but remote country, and claims a feeling of
patriotism which is vague and ill defined; but the authority of the
States controls every individual citizen at every hour and in all
circumstances; it protects his property, his freedom, and his life; and
when we recollect the traditions, the customs, the prejudices of local
and familiar attachment with which it is connected, we cannot doubt of
the superiority of a power which is interwoven with every circumstance
that renders the love of one's native country instinctive in the human
heart.

Since legislators are unable to obviate such dangerous collisions as
occur between the two sovereignties which coexist in the federal system,
their first object must be, not only to dissuade the confederate States
from warfare, but to encourage such institutions as may promote the
maintenance of peace. Hence it results that the Federal compact cannot
be lasting unless there exists in the communities which are leagued
together a certain number of inducements to union which render their
common dependence agreeable, and the task of the Government light,
and that system cannot succeed without the presence of favorable
circumstances added to the influence of good laws. All the peoples which
have ever formed a confederation have been held together by a certain
number of common interests, which served as the intellectual ties of
association.

But the sentiments and the principles of man must be taken into
consideration as well as his immediate interests. A certain uniformity
of civilization is not less necessary to the durability of a
confederation than a uniformity of interests in the States which compose
it. In Switzerland the difference which exists between the Canton of Uri
and the Canton of Vaud is equal to that between the fifteenth and the
nineteenth centuries; and, properly speaking, Switzerland has never
possessed a federal government. The union between these two cantons only
subsists upon the map, and their discrepancies would soon be perceived
if an attempt were made by a central authority to prescribe the same
laws to the whole territory.

One of the circumstances which most powerfully contribute to support the
Federal Government in America is that the States have not only similar
interests, a common origin, and a common tongue, but that they are also
arrived at the same s