THE ACTION

IV

OF CENTRIPETAL

AND CENTRIFUGAL FORCES ON

1

POLITICAL CONSTITUTIONS 1

As every government and every constitution is the result of certain forces and tendencies which bring men together in an organized community, so every government and every constitution tends when formed to hold men together thenceforth, training them to direct their efforts to a common end and to sacrifice for that purpose a certain measure of the exercise of their individual wills. So strong is the aggregative tendency, that each community naturally goes on by a sort of law of nature to expand and draw in others, whether persons or groups, who have not previously belonged to it: nor is physical force the prime agent, for the great majority of mankind prefer some kind of political society, even one in whose management they have little or no share, to mere isolation. As this process of expansion and aggregation continues, the different political groups which it has called into being come necessarily in contact with one another. The weaker ones are overcome or peacefully absorbed by the stronger ones, and thus the number of groups is continually lessened. Where two communities of nearly equal strength encounter each other, each may for a time succeed in resisting the

1 This Essay was composed in the early part of 1885. It has been revised throughout, but the substance remains the same.

attraction of the other. But in this changeful world it almost always happens that sooner or later one becomes so much stronger that the other yields to it: and thus in course of time the number of detached communities, i. e. of groups each with its own centre of attraction, becomes very small, because the weak have been swallowed up by the strong. This is the general, though, as we shall see, not the universal course of events. There is also another force at work, which has at some moments in history developed great strength.

I. HOW THE TENDENCIES TO AGGREGATION AND TO DISJUNCTION RESPECTIVELY AFFECT CONSTITUTIONS.

Of the many analogies that have been remarked between Law in the Physical and Law in the Moral World, none is more familiar than that derived from the Newtonian astronomy, which shows us two forces always operative in our solar system. One force draws the planets towards the sun as the centre of the system, the other disposes them to fly off from it into space. So in politics, we may call the tendency which draws men or groups of men together into one organized community and keeps them there a Centripetal force, and that which makes men, or groups, break away and disperse, a Centrifugal. A political Constitution or frame of government, as the complex totality of laws embodying the principles and rules whereby the community is organized, governed, and held together, is exposed to the action of both these forces. The centripetal force strengthens it, by inducing men (or groups of men) to maintain, and even to tighten, the bonds by which the

members of the community are gathered into one organized body. The centrifugal assails it, by dragging men (or groups) apart, so that the bonds of connexion are strained, and possibly at last loosened or broken. That no community can be exempt from the former force is obvious. But neither can any wholly escape the latter. For every community has been built out of smaller groups, and the members of such groups have seldom quite lost the attraction which each had to its own particular centre, such attraction being of course dissociative as regards the other groups and their members1. Moreover in no large community can there ever be a complete identity of views and wishes, of interests and feelings, between all the members. Many must have something to complain of, something which sets them against the rest and makes them desire to be, for some purposes, differently treated, or (in extreme cases) to be entirely separated. The existence of such a grievance constitutes a centre round which a group is formed, and this group is in so far an element of disjunction. Accordingly the history of every community and every constitution may be regarded as a struggle between the action of these two forces, that which draws together and that which pushes apart, that which unites and that which dissevers.

This subject, it may be thought, belongs either to History, in so far as history attempts to draw general conclusions from the facts she records, or to that branch of political science which may be called Poli

1 In the pages that follow the word Group is used to denote the section of persons within a larger community who may be held together by some tie, whether of interest or sentiment or race or local habitation, which makes them a sort of minor community inside the larger one.

tical Dynamics, and is one with which the constitutional lawyer is not directly concerned. The constitutional lawyer, however, must always, if he is to comprehend his subject and treat it fruitfully, be a historian as well as a lawyer. His legal institutions and formulae do not belong to a sphere of abstract theory but to a concrete world of fact. Their soundness is not merely a logical but also a practical soundness, that is to say, institutions and rules must represent and be suited to the particular phenomena they have to deal with in a particular country. It is through history that these phenomena are known. History explains how they have come to be what they are. History shows whether they are the result of tendencies still increasing or of tendencies already beginning to decline. History explains them by parallel phenomena in other times and places. Thus the lawyer who has to consider and advise on any constitutional problem, and still more the lawyer who has to contrive a constitutional scheme for grappling with a political difficulty, must study the matter as a historian, otherwise he will himself err and mislead those whom he advises. Great lawyers often have so erred, and with lamentable results. A lawyer who shall deal with a constitutional problem as he would deal with a technical point in the law of real property will be as much astray as an advocate who should prosecute or defend a political prisoner with a sole regard to the law of treason or sedition which he may find in his books, heedless of the temper and opinion of those from among whom the jury will be drawn.

An obvious illustration may be found in the fact that

when any particular community is studied from the constitutional point of view, and the inquiry is raised whether it ought to have a Flexible or a Rigid Constitution, the question of the comparative actual strength of these two forces becomes a vital one. Where the centripetal force is palpably the stronger, either sort of constitution will do to hold the community together: and the choice between the two sorts may be made on other grounds. But where the centrifugal force is potent, and especially where there are reasons to apprehend its further development, the establishment of a Rigid Constitution may become desirable, and yet may be a matter of much delicacy and difficulty. If the constitution be framed in the interests of a centralizing policy, there is a danger that it may assume and require for its maintenance a greater strength in the centripetal forces than really exists, and that for the want of such strength the constitution may be exposed to a strain it cannot resist. Amid the constant change of phenomena, a Rigid Constitution necessarily represents the past, not the present; and if the tendencies actually operative are towards the dissociation of the component groups of the community, a frame of government which fails to provide scope for these tendencies will soon become out of date and unfit for its work. Where, on the other hand, the existence of distinct groups, each desiring some control of its own affairs, is fully perceived and duly admitted as a factor in the condition of the community, and where it is desired to give legal recognition to the fact, and to protect the other local groups or sub-communities from being overridden by the largest among the groups, or by the