18. What are the principal sources of revenue in your village or city? What is the rate of taxation on the taxable property?
CHAPTER III
THE STATE GOVERNMENTS
Place of the States in Our Federal System.—Proceeding upward from the county, township, and city, we come to the state, the authority to which the local governments described in the preceding chapters are all subject. The consideration of state government properly precedes the study of national government, not only because the states existed before the national government did, and in a sense furnished the models upon which it was constructed, but because their governments regulate the larger proportion of our public affairs and hence concern more vitally the interests of the mass of people than does the national government.
The states collectively make up our great republic, but they are not mere administrative districts of the union created for convenience in carrying on the affairs of national government. They do not, for example, bear the same relation to the union that a county does to the state, or a township to the county. A county is nothing more than a district carved out of the state for administrative convenience, and provided with such an organization and given such powers of local government as the state may choose to give it. The states, on the other hand, are not creations of the national government; their place as constituent members of the union is determined by the Federal Constitution, framed by the people of the United States, and their rights and obligations are fixed by the same authority. Each state, however, determines its own form of government and decides for itself what activities it will undertake.
Division of Powers.—The Federal Constitution has marked out a definite sphere of power for the states, on the one hand, and another sphere for the national government on the other, and each within its sphere is supreme. Upon the domain thus created for each the other may not encroach. Each is kept strictly within its own constitutional sphere by the federal Supreme Court, and the balance between the union and its members is harmoniously preserved.
The states were already in existence with organized governments in operation when the national government was created. The founders of the national government conferred upon it only such powers as experience and reason demonstrated could be more effectively regulated by a common government than by a number of separate governments; they left the states largely as they were, and limited their powers only so far as was necessary to establish a more effective union than the one then existing. Experience had taught them, for example, that commerce with foreign countries and among the states themselves should be regulated by a single authority acting for the entire country: only in this way could uniformity be secured, and uniformity in such matters was indispensable to the peace and perpetuity of the union. Accordingly, the national government was vested with power over this and other matters which clearly required uniformity of regulation, and the remaining powers of government were left with the states, where they had always been. Thus it came about that the national government was made an authority of enumerated or delegated powers, while the states have reserved powers.
Prohibitions.—It was thought wise, however, to prohibit both the national government and those of the states from doing certain things, and thus we find provisions in the Federal Constitution forbidding both governments from granting titles of nobility, from passing ex post facto laws, bills of attainder, etc. Likewise the states were prohibited from entering into treaties with foreign countries, from coining money, from impairing the obligation of contracts, and from passing laws on certain other subjects which it was clearly unwise to leave to state regulation.