alone among modern republics,
through nearly three generations of time without the cost of one drop
of blood shed in civil war. With freedom and concert of action, it has
enabled us to contend successfully on the battlefield against foreign
foes, has elevated the feeble colonies into powerful States, and has
raised our industrial productions and our commerce which transports them
to the level of the richest and the greatest nations of Europe. And the
admirable adaptation of our political institutions to their objects,
combining local self-government with aggregate strength, has established
the practicability of a government like ours to cover a continent with
confederate states.

The Congress of the United States is in effect that congress of
sovereignties which good men in the Old World have sought for, but
could never attain, and which imparts to America an exemption from the
mutable leagues for common action, from the wars, the mutual invasions,
and vague aspirations after the balance of power which convulse from
time to time the Governments of Europe. Our cooperative action rests
in the conditions of permanent confederation prescribed by the
Constitution. Our balance of power is in the separate reserved rights
of the States and their equal representation in the Senate. That
independent sovereignty in every one of the States, with its reserved
rights of local self-government assured to each by their coequal power
in the Senate, was the fundamental condition of the Constitution.
Without it the Union would never have existed. However desirous the
larger States might be to reorganize the Government so as to give
to their population its proportionate weight in the common counsels,
they knew it was impossible unless they conceded to the smaller ones
authority to exercise at least a negative influence on all the measures
of the Government, whether legislative or executive, through their equal
representation in the Senate. Indeed, the larger States themselves could
not have failed to perceive that the same power was equally necessary
to them for the security of their own domestic interests against the
aggregate force of the General Government. In a word, the original
States went into this permanent league on the agreed premises of
exerting their common strength for the defense of the whole and of
all its parts, but of utterly excluding all capability of reciprocal
aggression. Each solemnly bound itself to all the others ne