362 HASTINGS—POLICE POWER OF THE STATE. [June 19, 
stitutions made to fit the articles of confederation. Those still 
living under their colonial charters, of course, had organizations 
designed to work in subordination to Great Britain. All were thus 
intended from the beginning to operate under some sort of external 
authority. Such adaptation had not been difficult for a people 
who, with large freedom for self-government, had from the begin- 
ning down to the commencement of revolutionary troubles been 
sincerely loyal to the British Crown and gloried in its supremacy. 
Many of the state constitutions of the colonies had been adopted 
during the struggle for independence, and under such circum- 
stances these constitutions naturally were not of a separatist char- 
acter. ; 
There seemed to these ‘‘ Englishmen’’ of America at that time 
nothing absurd or impossible in the idea of a divided political 
sovereignty. That sovereignty, or what they, following Vattel and 
Blackstone,’ regarded as such, the power to make and enforce laws, 
was indivisible, they utterly denied. Hamilton in Zhe Federalist’ 
answered the objection that sovereignty was indivisible, simply by 
saying that it is absurd to argue the impossibility of what both is 
and has been. So when they found the confederation could not 
care for their common interests, and that the formation of separate 
confederacies was imminent, moved not by fear of enemy from 
without, but by that spectre of ‘‘states discordant, dissevered, 
belligerent,’’ which so haunted Webster to the end of his life, and 
so prophetically as events proved, they proceeded to build after the 
model of their several state governments a national government 
extending over the whole but resting down directly upon the peo- 
ple to which should be committed just those common interests of 
the states and nothing else. So much of the old fabric of the con- 
federation as they could use was employed. The rest they threw 
away. 
The very completeness with which the state government had 
already occupied the ground became, and still constitutes, the prime 
condition of the success of the national organization. This fact 
rendered possible the complete specialization of the national gov- 
ernment for national purposes, which at once makes it strong for 
such purposes and prevents conflict with local authority. This 
specialization of action on the part of the general government was 
1 Blackstone Com. i, 49; Le Droit des Gens, sec. 38. 
2 Federalist, No. 39, Lodge edition, p. 195. 
