All these tendencies, pulling this way and that, are among the facts which a given Constitution has to deal with, are forces which it must use in order to secure its own strength and permanence. Where, in a free country, the system of government has grown up naturally, and can be readily modified by the normal action of the normal sovereign authority, i. e. where the Constitution is a Flexible one, the presumption is that the rules and usages of the Constitution conform to and represent the actual forces, and draw strength therefrom. Yet even in countries governed on this system there is a risk that the Constitution which the will of a majority has established may leave a minority discontented and unrestful, and that such discontent and unrest may impede the working of the machinery and create an element of instability. In such countries, it may be the part of wisdom for the majority to yield something to the minority, modifying the Constitution, so far as it can safely be modified, in order to remove the obstacles to harmony. A centrifugal force which is not strong enough to disrupt the State, because the centripetal forces are on the whole more powerful, may nevertheless be able to cause a harmful friction, and may even, if the State be exposed to external attacks, become a source of peril. Everybody can now see that Rome ought to have admitted the Italian allies to the franchise long before the Social War, that Catholic Emancipation ought to have been enacted by the Irish Parliament in 1796 or by the British Parliament immediately after the Union of 1800, that Denmark ought not to have waited till 1874 before she conceded a qualified autonomy to Iceland, that the same country might

probably have retained Schleswig-Holstein if she had yielded long before the war of 1864 some of the demands made by the German inhabitants of those duchies. And, if we may apply the same principle to despotically governed countries, most people will agree that Austria ought to have retired from Lombardy before 1859, and that the Turks gained nothing by clinging to Bulgaria, and may be gaining nothing now by clinging to Macedonia.

III. How CONSTITUTIONS MAY USE THE CENTRIPETAL FORCES TO PROMOTE NATIONAL UNITY.

As we are here dealing with constitutions considered in their relation to the forces and tendencies that rule in politics (i.e. as a part of political dynamics), we may now inquire what it is that Constitutions can accomplish in the way of regulating or controlling these forces.

Every political Constitution has three main objects.

One is to establish and maintain a frame of government under which the work of the State can be efficiently carried on, the aims of such a frame of government being on the one hand to associate the people with the government, and, on the other hand, to preserve public order, to avoid hasty decisions and to maintain a tolerable continuity of policy.

Another is to provide due security for the rights of the individual citizen as respects person, property, and opinion, so that he shall have nothing to fear from the executive or from the tyranny of an excited majority. This object has fallen into the background since these rights came to be fully recognized. But in earlier times

it was the chief purpose of constitutional provisions from Magna Charta down to the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence. The safeguard for these rights which the Constitution of England provided, was the thing which, more perhaps than anything else, moved the admiration of foreign observers who studied that constitution during the eighteenth century.

The third object is to hold the State together, not only to prevent its disruption by the revolt or secession of a part of the nation, but to strengthen the cohesiveness of the country by creating good machinery for connecting the outlying parts with the centre, and by appealing to every motive of interest and sentiment that can lead all sections of the inhabitants to desire to remain united under one government.

In pursuing these objects, a constitution seeks to achieve by means of legal provisions that which in ruder times it was often necessary to accomplish by physical force. No doubt at all times the natural disposition to obey (the sources of which I have analysed elsewhere 1) was an agent more constant and effective than physical force. Nevertheless, the latter was needed, sometimes from the side of the government to maintain order and compel subjects to bear their share of the public burdens, sometimes from the side of the subjects to abate the abuses into which the possession of power tempts rulers. Troops to keep order and quell revolts, and men handy with their weapons and ready to rise in insurrection to dethrone bad monarchs or expel bad ministers, were a necessary part of the equipment of political societies in the ruder ages.

1 See Essay IX, vol. ii. p. 6 sqq.

A good constitution relieves the government from the necessity of frequently resorting to military force by securing that those who govern shall be persons approved by the bulk of the citizens, as well as by providing for the purposes of coercion machinery so promptly and effectively applicable, that the elements of disturbance either do not break forth or are quickly suppressed. Similarly it relieves the subjects from the need of rising in rebellion by providing machinery whereby the complaints of those who think themselves aggrieved shall be fully made known, and shall, if well founded, have due effect on the rulers by warning them to remove the grievances, or by displacing them if they fail to do so.

How constitutional machinery should be framed and worked for the attainment of the two former objects enumerated above, viz. the establishment of a proper frame of government and the safeguarding of private rights, is a matter which does not fall within the scope of our present inquiry. The third object does, so we have to ask how a constitution should be framed in order to enable it to maintain and strengthen the unity of a State.

It may do this in two ways. One is by setting various centripetal forces to work. The other is by preventing all or some of the centrifugal forces from working.

I have already enumerated the tendencies or influences which operate to draw men together and bind them into a community, be it greater or smaller, and have pointed out that these tendencies may in any given case operate in favour either of the State as a whole, in which case they preserve it, or in favour of some group

or section within it, in which case they sap its unity. Let us now consider how the constitutional arrangements of a State may be so devised as to draw together all its members and all the minor groups within it.

The most generally available of these centripetal tendencies is trade, that interchange of commodities which benefits all the producers, by giving them a market, all the consumers by giving them the means of getting what they want, all the middlemen by supplying them with occupation. A Constitution can render no greater service to the unity as well as to the material progress of a nation than by enabling the freest interchange of products to go on within its limits. Nothing did more to keep the districts of each of the great European countries divided during the Middle Ages than the levying of tolls along the rivers and highways by petty potentates, or than the insecurity of those rivers and highways, as well as the want of good roads, for thus the market for the producers of the cheaper articles was narrowed to the small area immediately around them, and men were prevented from realizing, or benefiting by, the greatness of the country they belonged to. England, with an exceptionally strong and centralized government, suffered less from these tolls and this insecurity than did the large States of the Continent, and England arrived at unity sooner than they did. And so, conversely, nothing has done more to unify the vast territories of the United States than the provisions of the Federal Constitution which secure perfect freedom of trade within its limits, and empower the National Government to regulate the means of communication between the several States of