s a democracy with an essentially national career.

II

NATIONALITY AND CENTRALIZATION

The Federal political organization has always tended to confuse to the
American mind the relation between democracy and nationality. The nation
as a legal body was, of course, created by the Constitution, which
granted to the central government certain specific powers and
responsibilities, and which almost to the same extent diminished the
powers and the responsibilities of the separate states. Consequently, to
the great majority of Americans, the process of increasing
nationalization has a tendency to mean merely an increase in the
functions of the central government. For the same reason the affirmation
of a constructive relation between the national and the democratic
principles is likely to be interpreted merely as an attempt on the
grounds of an abstract theory to limit state government and to disparage
states rights. Such an interpretation, however, would be essentially
erroneous. It would be based upon the very idea against which I have
been continually protesting--the idea that the American nation, instead
of embodying a living formative political principle, is merely the
political system created by the Federal Constitution; and it would end
in the absurd conclusion that the only way in which the Promise of
American democracy can be fulfilled would be by the abolition of
American local political institutions.

The nationalizing of American political, economic, and social life means
something more than Federal centralization and something very different
therefrom. To nationalize a people has never meant merely to centralize
their government. Little by little a thoroughly national political
organization has come to mean in Europe an organization which combined
effective authority with certain responsibilities to the people; but the
national interest has been just as likely to demand de-centralization as
it has to demand centralization. The Prussia of Frederick the Great, for
instance, was over-centralized; and the restoration of the national
vitality, at which the Prussian government aimed after the disasters of
1806, necessarily took the form of reinvigorating the local members of
the national body. In this and many similar instances the national
interest and welfare was the end, and a greater or smaller amount of
centralized government merely the necessary machinery. The process of
centralization is not, like the process