y act on different matters,
and neither is nor can be subordinated to the other.

Now, this division of power, which decentralizes the government without
creating mutually hostile forces, can hardly be introduced into any
European state. There may be a union of states in Great Britain, in
Germany, in Italy, perhaps in Spain, and Austria is laboring hard to
effect it in her heterogeneous empire; but the union possible in any of
them is that of a Bund or confederation, like the Swiss or German Bund,
similar to what the secessionists in the United States so recently
attempted and have so signally failed to establish. An intelligent
Confederate officer remarked that their Confederacy had not been in
operation three months before it became evident that the principle on
which it was founded, if not rejected, would insure its defeat. It was
that principle of State sovereignty, for which the States seceded, more
than the superior resources and numbers of the Government, that caused
the collapse of the Confederacy. The numbers were relatively about
equal, and the military resources of the Confederacy were relatively
not much inferior to those of the Government. So at least the
Confederate leaders thought, and they knew the material resources of
the Government as well as their own, and had calculated them with as
much care and accuracy as any men could. Foreign powers also, friendly
as well as unfriendly, felt certain that the secessionists would gain
their independence, and so did a large part of the people even of the
loyal States. The failure is due to the disintegrating principle of
State sovereignty, the very principle of the Confederacy. The war has
proved that united states are, other things being equal, an overmatch
for confederated states.

The European states must unite either as equals or as unequals. As
equals, the union can be only a confederacy, a sort of Zollverein, in
which each state retains its individual sovereignty; if as unequals,
then someone among them will aspire to the hegemony, and you have over
again the Athenian Confederation, formed at the conclusion of the
Persian war, and its fate. A union like the American cannot be created
by a compact, or by the exercise of supreme power. The Emperor of the
French cannot erect the several Departments of France into states, and
divide the powers of government between them as individual and as
united states. They would necessarily hold from the imperial