ns. This must be rather
fanciful. The aggregate community is sovereign, but that is not _the_
sovereignty which acts in the daily exercise of sovereign power. The
people cannot act daily as the people. They must establish a government,
and invest it with so much of the sovereign power as the case requires;
and this sovereign power being delegated and placed in the hands of the
government, that government becomes what is popularly called THE STATE.
I like the old-fashioned way of stating things as they are; and this is
the true idea of a state. It is an organized government, representing
the collected will of the people, as far as they see fit to invest that
government with power. And in that respect it is true, that, though
_this_ government possesses sovereign power, it does not possess _all_
sovereign power; and so the State governments, though sovereign in some
respects, are not so in all. Nor could it be shown that the powers of
both, as delegated, embrace the whole range of what might be called
sovereign power. We usually speak of the States as sovereign States. I
do not object to this. But the Constitution never so styles them, nor
does the Constitution speak of the government here as the _general_ or
the _federal_ government. It calls this government the United States;
and it calls the State governments State governments. Still the fact is
undeniably so; legislation is a sovereign power, and is exercised by the
United States government to a certain extent, and also by the States,
according to the forms which they themselves have established, and
subject to the provisions of the Constitution of the United States.

Well, then, having agreed that all power is originally from the people,
and that they can confer as much of it as they please, the next
principle is, that, as the exercise of legislative power and the other
powers of government immediately by the people themselves is
impracticable, they must be exercised by REPRESENTATIVES of the people;
and what distinguishes American governments as much as any thing else
from any governments of ancient or of modern times, is the marvellous
felicity of their representative system. It has with us, allow me to
say, a somewhat different origin from the representation of the commons
in England, though that has been worked up to some resemblance of our
own. The representative system in England had its origin, not in any
supposed rights of the people themselves, but in the nec