vision that changes must be passed by two successive legislatures, and must have been put before the people at the election of members for the second. Some States provide for the submission to the people at fixed intervals, of seven, ten, sixteen, or twenty years, of the propriety of calling a convention to revise the Constitution, so as to secure that the attention of the people shall be drawn to the question whether their scheme of government ought or ought not to be changed. Be it observed, however, that whereas the Federal Constitution can be amended only by a vote of three-fourths of the States, a Constitution can in nearly every State be changed by a bare majority of the citizens voting at the polls. Hence we may expect, and shall find, that these instruments are altered more frequently and materially than the Federal Constitution has been.

A State Constitution is not only independent of the central national government (save in certain points already specified), it is also the fundamental organic law of the State itself. The State exists as a commonwealth by virtue of its Constitution, and all State authorities, legislative, executive, and judicial, are the creatures of, and subject to, the State Constitution.2

1 Sometimes, however, an absolute majority of all the qualified voters is required. In Rhode Island (where the voting is in town and ward meetings) a three-fifths majority is needed, and in South Carolina the ratification of the next elected legislature by a two-thirds majority in each House is necessary. In Kentucky and Delaware the proposal to call a convention must be approved by a majority of all the voters. Delaware having during several years failed in the attempt to amend her Constitution (of 1831) by the legislature, fell back, in 1887, on the proposal to hold a constitutional convention, but could not secure a sufficiently large vote.

2 Some details as to the provisions of State Constitutions, and observations on a few of them, may be found in the following works :-Stimson's American Statute Law, Hitchcock's American State Constitutions (in Messrs. Putnam's "Useful Questions of the Day" Series); Davis's "American Constitutions," in Johns Hopkins University Studies; and the article "States" in the American Cyclopædia of Political Science. Of course the great

Just as the President and Congress are placed beneath the Federal Constitution, so the Governor and Houses of a State are subject to its Constitution, and any act of theirs done either in contravention of its provisions, or in excess of the powers it confers on them, is absolutely void. All that has been said in preceding chapters regarding the functions of the courts of law where an Act of Congress is alleged to be inconsistent with the Federal Constitution, applies equally where a statute passed by a State legislature is alleged to transgress the Constitution of the State, and of course such validity may be contested in any court, whether a State court or a Federal court, because the question is an ordinary question of law, and is to be solved by determining whether or no a law of inferior authority is inconsistent with a law of superior authority. Whenever in any legal proceeding before any tribunal, either party relies on a State statute, and the other party alleges that this statute is ultra vires of the State legislature, and therefore void, the tribunal must determine the question just as it would determine whether a bye-law made by a municipal council or a railway company was in excess of the law-making power which the muncipality or the company had received from the higher authority which incorporated it and gave it such legislative power as it possesses. But although Federal courts are fully competent to entertain a question arising on the conauthority is the collection of the State Constitutions, embracing all that have been duly enacted since 1776, in the two thick quarto volumes entitled Federal and State Constitutions, published under the authority of Congress by Ben. Perley Poore, 2 vols., Washington, 1878. It is much to be wished that an annual or biennial supplement to Poore's collection should be officially published, containing all the new constitutions and constitutional amendments. At present it is very difficult, especially for a resident in Europe, to ascertain exactly how the constitution of each State stands; and I ask indulgence for any errors into which I may, owing to this difficulty, have fallen.

struction of a State Constitution, their practice is to follow the precedents set by any decision of a court of the State in question, just as they would follow the decision of an English court in determining a point of purely English law. They hold not only that each State must be assumed to know its own law better than a stranger can, but also that the supreme court of a State is the authorized exponent of the mind of the people who enacted its Constitution.

A State Constitution is really nothing but a law made directly by the people voting at the polls upon a draft submitted to them. The people of a State

when they so vote act as a primary and constituent assembly, just as if they were all summoned to meet in one place like the folkmoots of our Teutonic forefathers. It is only their numbers that prevent them from so meeting in one place, and oblige the vote to be taken at a variety of polling places. Hence the enactment of a Constitution is an exercise of direct popular sovereignty to which we find few parallels in modern Europe, though it was familiar enough to the republics of antiquity, and has lasted till now in some of the cantons of Switzerland.1

The importance of this character of a State Constitution as a popularly-enacted law, overriding every minor State law, becomes all the greater when the contents of these Constitutions are examined. Europeans conceive of a constitution as an instrument, usually a short instrument, which creates a frame of government, defines its departments and powers, and declares the

1 See the interesting remarks on the Swiss Landesgemeinde in Mr. Freeman's Comparative Politics. Nowadays, however, the Landesgemeinde (which survive only in Uri, Unterwalden, Glarus, and Appenzell) do not act as constituent or constitution-enacting bodies, though they still directly legislate.

VOL. II

D

primordial rights" of the subject or citizen as against the rulers. An American State Constitution does this, but does more; and in most cases, infinitely more. It deals with a variety of topics which in Europe would be left to the ordinary action of the legislature, or of administrative authorities; and it pursues these topics into a minute detail hardly to be looked for in a fundamental instrument. Some of these details will be mentioned presently. Meantime I will sketch in outline the frame and contents of the more recent constitutions, reserving for next chapter remarks on the differences of type between those of the older and those of the newer States.

A normal Constitution consists of five parts :

I. The definition of the boundaries of the State. (This does not occur in the case of the older States.)

II. The so-called Bill of Rights-an enumeration (whereof more anon) of the citizens' primordial rights to liberty of person and security of property. This usually stands at the beginning of the Constitution, but occasionally at the end.

III. The frame of government-i.e. the names functions and powers of the executive officers, the legislative bodies, and the courts of justice. This occupies several articles.

IV. Miscellaneous provisions relating to administration and law, including articles treating of schools, of the militia, of taxation and revenue, of the public debts, of local government, of State prisons and hospitals, of agriculture, of labour, of impeachment, and of the method of amending the Constitution, besides other matters, to be mentioned presently, still less political in their character. The order in which these occur differs in different instruments, and there are some in which

some of the above topics are not mentioned at all. The more recent Constitutions and those of the newer States are much fuller on these points.

V. The Schedule, which contains provisions relating to the method of submitting the Constitution to the vote of the people, and arrangements for the transition from the previous Constitution to the new one which is to be enacted by that vote. Being of a temporary nature,

the schedule is not strictly a part of the Constitution.

The Bill of Rights is historically the most interesting part of these Constitutions, for it is the legitimate child and representative of Magna Charta, and of those other declarations and enactments, down to the Bill of Rights of the Act of 1 William and Mary, session 2, by which the liberties of Englishmen have been secured. Most of the thirteen colonies when they asserted their independence and framed their Constitutions inserted a declaration of the fundamental rights of the people, and the example then set has been followed by the newer States, and, indeed, by the States generally in their most recent Constitutions. Considering that all danger from the exercise. of despotic power upon the people of the States by the executive has long since vanished, their executive authorities being the creatures of popular vote and nowadays rather too weak than too strong, it may excite surprise that these assertions of the rights and immunitles of the individual citizen as against the government should continue to be repeated in the instruments of to-day. A reason may be found in the remarkable constitutional conservatism of the Americans, and in their fondness for the enunciation of the general maxims of political freedom. But it is also argued that these declarations of principle have a practical value, as asserting the rights of individuals and of minorities