FEDERAL GOVERNMENT ( Lat. f u'dcra I us, bound by treaty', trout firdu.s, a treaty). When two or more States, otherwise indepdol ent, bind themselves together by a treaty or an organic act so as to present to the external world the aspect of a single State, without, wholly re nouncing their individual powers of internal self government, they are said to form it federation. The contracting parties are sovereign States act ing through their representatives, and the extent to which the central overrules the local legisla ture is lixed by the terms of the contract. In so far as the local sovereignty is renounced and the central power becomes sovereign within the limits of the federated States, the federation approaches to the character of a nation; hut the only renunciation of sovereignty which a federation, as such, necessarily implies, consists ill abandoning the power which each separate State otherwise would possess of forming hide Ilendent relations with foreign States. "There are," says J. S. I\ lill, "two different modes of or ganizing a federal union. The federal authori ties may represent the governments solely, and their acts may he obligatory only on the gov ernments as such, or they may have the power of enacting laws and issuing orders which are binding directly on individual citizens. The former is the plan of the German so-called con federation, and of the Swiss Confederation pre vious to 1847. It was tried in America for a few years immediately following the War of Inde The other principle is that of the existing Constitution of the United States, and has been adopted within the last dozen years by the Swiss Confederacy. The Federal Congress of the American Union is a substantive' part of the Government of every individual State. With in the limits of its attributions it makes laws which are obeyed by every citizen individually, executes them through its own officers, and en forces them by its own tribunals. This is the only principle which has been found, or which is even likely. to produce an effective federal
government. A union between the guvernments only is a mere alliance, and subjeet to all the contingencies which render alliances precarious." The difference between these two dissimilar forms of federation is aptly described by the terms employed in German political philosophy to differentiate them, and for which we have no equivalent terms in English—Staatenbund, federation of States, and Bundesstaat, a federat ed State. The federal governments of antiquity and of the Middle Ages were all of the former type, loosely knit confederacies, like those of Athens and the ephemeral combinations of petty Italian States in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Of a similar character is the union of two or more States under a single' monarch, as of Castile and Aragon under Ferdinand and Isabella, Austria and Hungary under Francis Joseph, and of Sweden and Norway under the present Swedish dynasty. Confederations of this character have generally proved to he unstable and of short duration. and none of those at present in existence seems likely to prove an exception to this rule. It is to the more enlightened po litical consciousness of modern times, and espe cially to the institution of representative popu lar governments. that the more durable type of federal government—the federated State—owes its existence. The formation of the United States of America under the present Constitution was the first attempt to realize this form of federa tion on a scale large enough to command the at tention of the world, and the great success of the experiment of combining local independence with national power has impressed itself upon the political consciousness of Christendom. Thus, just as the British Constitution has become the model of representative government for the na tions of western Europe, the American federa tion has become the type of federal government for two continents.