Federalism in North America CHAPTER I THE FEDERAL IDEA The average visitor from Europe who makes a summer tour through the United States and Canada notices but little difference between the two countries when he crosses the frontier at Niagara or elsewhere. Except in passing to or from the Province of Quebec, where the French tradition combines with a recent amendment of the United States Constitution to emphasize the importance of the boundary, the traveler finds that language, customs, and social conventions are practically the same on each side of the line. If he gives a passing thought to political institutions he knows vaguely that both countries are governed on a federal basis, and he generally assumes that the two federations are more or less similar in principle. This notion, which is by no means confined to European visitors, is utterly at variance with the facts. The two systems of government are profoundly dissimilar. They are the products of widely different historical conditions. Each constitution is based upon distinct theories of political science, and these theories find their expression in two widely different systems of organization. These differences are reproduced again in the political life and habits of the two peoples. To analyze and compare the principles underlying the institutions of the United States and Canada is the object of the following chapters. Let it be said at once that this process of comparison does not require us to enter into judgment and to pronounce dogmatically that one political system is better than the other. Criticism of minor details may sometimes be profitable, but there is no absolute standard of excellence upon which a general judgment can be based. The constitution of each country is entirely a growth of the soil, created originally by the free act of the people and molded into its present form by their continued political experience. Each nation has much to learn from a sympathetic and unprejudiced comparison of its own institutions with those of its neighbor. On the other hand, for either people to attempt to reproduce as a whole the policy of the other would be an almost inconceivable act of folly. In the realm of political science the world has now considerable experience of two main types of error. One is that species of narrow-minded insularity, often miscalling itself conservatism or patriotism, which regards |