CHAPTER X

The Union


When we are laying the foundation of a building, which is to last for
ages, and in which millions are interested, it ought to be well laid. --
James Wilson in the American Union's Constitutional Convention.

American genius does not show itself in its Fords and Wall Streets; it
appears in its vital force only in its political constitution which
balances so well decentralization and unity. -- Count Sforza.

To balance a large State or society ... on general laws is a work of so
great difficulty that no human genius, however comprehensive, is able by
the mere dint of reason and reflection to effect it. The judgments of
many must unite in the work; experience must guide their labor; time
must bring it to perfection, and the feeling of inconveniences must
correct the mistakes which they inevitably fall into, in their first
trials and experiments. -- Hume.

To what degree should the democracies in organizing inter-state
government apply the union principle of government of the people, by the
people, for the people?

Government of the people: Here the principle must be fully applied: The
inter-state government where it governs at all must govern people, never
states. It must have the power to maintain itself by taxing all the
people of The Union. Its revenue must not depend in any way on the
governments of member states. It must have the power to raise and rule
directly the armed forces of The Union and be entirely independent of
the state governments in this field, too. Whatever laws it makes must
never bear on the member states as states but only on all the
inhabitants of The Union as individuals. It must have its own
independent machinery for enforcing these Union laws throughout The
Union. Insofar population divided as individuals not as states.

"Insofar as it governs" -- that brings another question. The union
principle, we have seen, requires the fields of government to be divided
between The Union and member states. Just which shall be the fields
where The Union shall govern the people and which those where the nation
shall govern them is, of course, a great and abiding federal problem.
The answer depends on which government, Union or National, will best
promote in any given field at any given time the object for which both
were made, namely, the freedom in every sense of the individual. We
shall therefore consider this question later when we reach the third
point, government for the people.

Government by the people: Here again no exception to the union principle
must be allowed in favor of the National government, but some exceptions
may well be allowed in favor of the nations as peoples. That is, all the
organs of The Union government, legislative, executive, judicial, and
the machinery for amending The Union constitution, must be based
directly on the people. Their National government must have nothing to
do with these organs. But the Union government does not need to be based
entirely on the population with the individual taken as equal unit; it
can be based partly on the population divided by nations. It must
however be based predominantly on the former, as, for example, in the
American Union. How the balance between the two should be struck is one
of several questions in constitutional mechanism raised by the principle
of government by the people; these will be discussed when we reach the
problem of method.

Government for the people: This must be fully applied. The constitution
should make explicitly clear that The Union is made for the sake of the
people themselves, for the individual freedom of each person equally.
Practically, this means the constitution should provide (a) a list of
individual rights that the people retain and that the government is made
to preserve, and (b) a list of the rights which the people give to The
Union to enjoy exclusively or to share with the National governments, --
the division of powers, in short, between The Union and National
governments.

The Bill of Rights which The Union would guarantee all inhabitants would
contain those rights of the individual which all the founder democracies
now separately guarantee. The people of member democracies that
guarantee rights not included in the Union Bill would continue to enjoy
them. Union would prevent no nation in it from giving new rights to its
citizens. Instead new rights would be expected to grow and spread among
the member nations just as woman suffrage spread from one state to
another in the American Union till it became general.

THE GREAT FEDERAL PROBLEM

What shall be the division of rights or powers or fields of government
between The Union and the National governments?

If to each field of government we apply the test, Which will serve our
individual freedom best, to give The Union or leave the Nation the right
to govern in this field? we find five main rights that we need to give
to The Union. They are:

1. The right to grant citizenship.
2. The right to make peace and war, to negotiate treaties and otherwise deal
with the outside world, to raise and maintain a defense force.
3. The right to regulate inter-state and foreign trade.
4. The right to coin and issue money, and fix other measures.
5. The right to govern communications: To operate the postal service, and
regulate, control or operate other inter-state communication services.

Manifestly, The Union must provide citizenship in The Union. Obviously
this brings each of us an enormous gain in individual freedom. Since we
remain citizens of our nations in becoming citizens of The Union we lose
nothing and only gain. Union citizenship must involve inter-state
citizenship in the sense that a citizen in moving from one state to
another retains all his Union rights and can change his state
citizenship easily. The case for giving the other four rights to The
Union is no less clear. We are seeing every day in all these fields that
the rights we have granted our National governments to maintain separate
armed forces, separate customs areas, separate currencies and separate
communication systems have become not simply unnecessary to individual
freedom but increasingly dangerous interferences with it.

It is easy to imagine any of the free peoples going to war again to
maintain their rights as men. But can one imagine the American, British,
French, or any other free people flocking to the colors merely to defend
their present practice of taxing without representation each other's
citizens who happen to live with them? Can one imagine any of their
governments being able to raise an army to fight simply for its right to
impose tariffs against the other free peoples?

No free people lacks a proud record of heroes who gave their lives at
the stake so that men might have religious freedom. Is there among them
any record of heroes who burned alive so that men might have military
discipline and wear military uniforms? Do we call liberators or
militarists those who fight for the sake of an army or navy, to whom
armed force is a glorious end in itself, not a means to freedom,
dreadful even when necessary? The free whatever language they speak hold
dear the memory of martyrs who died for freedom of speech and of the
press. If there be men among them who would sacrifice their lives merely
to establish and maintain different kinds of bits of paper representing
money or postage, who would hold them dear?

Common sense, however, advises strongly against giving The Union even
minor rights that the older and most successful existing unions do not
have. The essential thing now is to get The Union established, not to
draw a perfect line between the things that belong to The Union and
those that belong to the nation. Our immediate aim must be to remove the
most immediate dangers to our freedom, and the easiest way to do this is
to make no change that is not urgently or clearly needed. Once The Union
is established time will remain for other changes.

Our object in uniting, we need to remember, is not to see how much we
can centralize government but rather how much we can decentralize it or
cut it out entirely as unnecessary. Though over-decentralization in five
fields drives us now to Union, it by no means follows that
centralization is the friend of freedom. The fact is, paradoxically,
that what little centralizing we would do in uniting would really be
done in order, on balance, to have more decentralization; we transfer
five rights to The Union in order to curb the centralizing tendency in
each of our nations which its possession of these rights now causes. We
create some new government in order to get rid of much more existing
government, to gain on balance more freedom from governmental
interference in our lives.

We create The Union to free ourselves from some fourteen governmental
barriers to our selling dear and buying cheap, to reduce the expense of
booming bureaucracy and monstrous armaments, to cut our way out of
government gone jungle. The acme of decentralization is, after all,
complete individual freedom. It is to come nearer to the democratic
ideal where each man governs himself so perfectly that no other
government is needed that we make our Union.

The five rights we would transfer to The Union are merely means of
defending those individual, local and national rights that democrats
hold dear, -- means, that is, of defending what decentralization we have
attained. Far from weakening these dearer rights, we protect and
strengthen them by this transfer. Failure to make this transfer forces
each democracy to centralize, to reduce individual and local rights so
as to keep these five national rights, to sacrifice the end to the
means.

The Union will give de jure status to all the existing decentralization
that democrats value -- to national home-rule for national affairs by
whatever system of government, republic, monarchy, or whatnot that each
nation desires, to each national language, each national education
system, each distinctive trait that makes each nation, and to the whole
distinctive system of local liberties and customs and individual rights
within the nation for which each nation stands. All these things now
really have only de facto status as regards the world outside each
nation. Only by uniting to recognize and guarantee all these national,
local and individual rights can the democracies legalize them even in
the democratic world. The practical result of their doing this,
moreover, is to make these rights much more secure as regards the
outside nations to whom they would remain only a de facto claim until
these nations themselves entered The Union.

In connection with centralization we need to remember that The Union
would be unique among unions because of its colossal material strength.
The strongest existing union, the United States, needs now to have much
stronger central governmental powers and to develop much more
homogeneity in its population than does this Union. The United States
needs to insist on more and more homogeneity among Americans, to invade
more and more the fields reserved to their states, to put more and more
power in the hands of one man, and to provide a growing array of costly
meddling central government organs, if its aim is not merely to defend
the individual freedom of Americans against foreign centralizers, but to
keep the American Union constantly pitted against other powerful free
peoples, such as the British and the French. The United States must
centralize more and more if it aims to battle all the time economically
and monetarily and financially with all the rest of mankind, and to
prepare always to battle separately from them by sea, land and air,
cannon, gas and bomb. There is no end to the amount of government
required when the aim of government is not only to live in world chaos
but to keep the chaos alive too.

Not only would our world Union, because of its unrivaled strength, need
homogeneity in its citizenry and centralization in its government much
less than does the United States now, but it would gain added strength
to protect the rights of its members by this very lack of homogeneity
and centralization. By encouraging the existing diversity among the
democracies The Union would protect the citizen from the danger of
hysteria sweeping through The Union.

HOW SHALL WE UNITE?

We come to the problem of method: How, concretely, shall we unite our
democracies to this desired degree? We can divide this problem in two.
There is, primarily, the underlying political problem of putting these
general principles into constitutional form, establishing The Union and
its governmental machinery. There is, secondarily, the practical problem
of meeting the various transitional and technical difficulties raised by
transfer of each of the five rights to The Union. The better to
distinguish between first things and matters of secondary importance we
shall consider the former here and the latter in Annex 2.

THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNION

The only detailed or concrete plan that The Union can need is a draft
constitution. For the establishment of The Union eliminates many of the
problems for which we now think we need plans and planned management,
and it provides itself the mechanism -- government -- for solving the
various problems of transition.

The Convention that framed the Constitution uniting the Thirteen
American democracies not only framed no plan except the Constitution,
but it had no draft even of a constitution when it began, nothing but
the broad outline of the Virginia plan for one -- and New Jersey and
Hamilton soon produced opposing plans. Unlike us they had no existing
federal constitution on which to base their planning.

Those who would constitute unions can turn now to many time-tested
successes. For reasons that will be seen when we study carefully the
American Union I believe that we should turn particularly to the
American Constitution and experience for guidance.

The drafters of the constitution of our world Union, however, will have
the great advantage of including authorities from every successful
democratic union, each of which has its own valuable contribution to
make. The Swiss themselves are best fitted to tell what they have
learned in uniting solid geographical and historical groups of Germans,
French and Italians. The Canadians can tell of their union of French and
English, the South Africans of their union of Boers and English, -- and
in the United Provinces and the United Kingdom the Dutch and English
have a much older experience to relate.

These examples may suffice to indicate the rich store of constitutional
experience which, since Hamilton cited the passage from Hume heading
this chapter, has been placed at the disposal of union
constitution-makers. They may indicate too the long tradition and
discipline and training in self-government on which our democracies can
count to aid them in uniting. We have only to organize The Union of
unions. Our constitutional problem is not so much the difficult one of
creating as the relatively easy one of selecting, adapting,
consolidating, perfecting. It is not the venturesome task of sowing but
the safer task of reaping the crop already grown by reason and chance,
trial and error.

It would seem now practically necessary to distinguish in The Union
territory between the parts that are already fully self-governing and
those that are not, and restrict the right to vote in Union elections
and to hold elective Union office to those born or naturalized citizens
of the former. This would not mean that those born in the rest of The
Union would be deprived of the other rights guaranteed individuals by
the constitution, nor of the right to vote and hold office in their
country. Instead, The Union's policy should be to train them for
admission to The Union as fully self-governing nations. It is true that
one can destroy democracy by seeking to spread it too quickly and
over-loading the state with too many voters untrained for
self-government. It is also true, however, that the only way to acquire
such training is to practice self-government, and that an old and
well-trained democracy can safely and even profitably absorb a much
greater proportion of inexperienced voters than seems theoretically
possible.

This whole problem is one of striking a balance, of deciding what
proportion of the peoples that for one reason or another are politically
weak shall be admitted at the outset to full citizenship. Common sense
would seem to suggest both that we start with a low proportion, and that
we explicitly state at the start that The Union's aim shall be to
increase this proportion thereafter as much as prudent experiment
justifies. A policy that deliberately and unequivocally aims at
preparing everyone in The Union for full citizenship should transform
existing colonial psychology and make the colonial problem much easier
to handle. It would be treating the politically inexperienced peoples
much the same as we treat politically our own immature sons and
daughters. These know that when they come of age they will enjoy full
citizenship rights, and this great section of the unfranchised has never
rebelled against the state nor taken the attitude the colonially
unfranchised often do.

THE UNION LEGISLATURE

The chief technical problem in drafting the Union constitution is the
organization of its governmental machinery, its legislative, executive
and judicial departments, and its mechanism for amending the
constitution.

Practice is strongly in favor of a two-house Union legislature with one
house based completely on the population and the other modifying this
principle of equal men in favor of equal states. If the constitution
allows one representative for every half million or million citizens,
the result would be roughly:

Australia ............ 13    7
Belgium .............. 16    8
Canada ............... 21   11
Denmark ..............  7    4
Finland ..............  7    4
France ............... 84   42
Ireland ..............  6    3
Netherlands .......... 16    8
New Zealand ..........  3    2
Norway ...............  6    3
Sweden ............... 12    6
Switzerland ..........  8    4
Union of So. Africa1..  4    2
United Kingdom ....... 93   47
United States ........258  129


 Totals ..............546  280

Those who fear this would give Americans too much weight in the House
need to remember two things. One is that this weight would diminish with
every new democracy that entered The Union. The other is that there is
no more danger of the American deputies or those from any other nation
voting as a bloc when elected individually by the people of separate
election districts than there is of the New York members of Congress or
the Scottish members of Parliament voting as a unit now. Party lines
would immediately cut across national ones in this Union as in all
others.

As for the Senate, its main purposes are to safeguard the less populous
against the more populous states, the state governments against The
Union government, and the people of The Union against
over-centralization. In the American Union the method of achieving this
purpose consists partly in allowing two senators to the people -- not
the government -- of each state, no matter what the number of people in
it may be. This might be copied in our Union. The difference in
population between the United States and New Zealand, the most and the
least populous democracies in our Union, is proportionately about the
same as the difference between New York and Nevada.

For my part, however, I would favor a slight modification of this part
of the American system. I would allow two senators to every
self-governing nation of 25,000,000 or less population, two additional
senators for every additional 25,000,000 or major fraction thereof up to
a total population of 100,000,000, and thereafter two more senators for
each 50,000,000 or major fraction thereof. This would give two senators
to each of the fifteen democracies except France, the United Kingdom and
the United States, the first two of which would have four and the third
would have eight. The results of the two systems may be seen below:

Australia ............  2    2
Belgium ..............  2    2
Canada ...............  2    2
Denmark ..............  2    2
Finland ..............  2    2
France ...............  2    4
Ireland ..............  2    2
Netherlands ..........  2    2
New Zealand ..........  2    2
Norway ...............  2    2
Sweden ...............  2    2
Switzerland ..........  2    2
Union of So. Africa ..  2    2
United Kingdom .......  2    4
United States ........  2    8


 Totals .............. 30   40

The American method would give the small democracies a preponderance of
five-sixths. The other would give them three-fifths the Senate at the
start, and these proportions would grow with the admission of new member
nations since nearly all potential members have less than 25,000,000
population. It would seem wise to allow the government of so vast a
Union as ours to draw more than the American system permits on the
experience of the democracies most accustomed to government on a big
scale, so long as the Senate's function of safeguarding the small
democracies and decentralization is not thereby endangered. Either way
the Senators would be elected at large by each nation, and each senator
would have one vote.

PARLIAMENTARY OR PRESIDENT GOVERNMENT?

There are obvious arguments for the parliamentary and for the
presidential system of government. The former is more responsive, the
latter more stable. One can argue that in this new venture of
establishing union on a world scale, and among so many historic nations,
the first aim must be stability. Once The Union is firmly established
its government can be made more responsive when the need becomes
insistent, whereas if The Union is so responsive at the start as to be
unstable it may be too late to remedy this defect and keep The Union
together. It is safer to cut cloth too long than too short. Moreover,
the establishment of The Union eliminates so much of the work of
government today as to make responsiveness less necessary.

On the other hand, one can argue that by eliminating all the burden and
waste of unnecessary government and by generally freeing the individual
we stimulate enormously the most powerful sources of change. The
drafters of the American Constitution had no way of knowing how rapidly
the United States would grow under the free conditions they provided. We
know now from this experience how conducive individual freedom is to
rapid growth, invention, discovery, change in everything. We need only
look back to see how the tempo of change has been accelerating every
generation since government began to be made on the principle of the
equality of man and for the Rights of Man. We cannot make this Union
without speeding proportionately the tempo of change. Prudence once
required for freedom stable rather than responsive government. Now
prudence demands greater provision for adaptability.

My own view favors a combination of the responsive and the stable, of
the parliamentary and presidential systems, -- a combination aimed at
keeping the advantages of each, meeting the peculiar needs of our Union,
and insuring that its government will not seem too strange to any of the
democracies. This brings us to the problem of the executive power. Only
here do I think that we need to invent or innovate in making this
constitution, though not very much even here.

THE EXECUTIVE

My suggestion is that instead of establishing a single executive we vest
executive authority in a Board of five persons, each selected for five
years, one each year, or each elected for ten years, one every other
year. This would assure constant change in the Board and constant
stability. I would have three elected by direct popular vote. I think it
highly essential that there be some officer or officers in The Union
elected by and responsible to the people of The Union as a whole, as is
the American President. The other two members of the Board I would have
elected in between the popular elections, one by the House of Deputies,
the other by the Senate. This should assure a more representative Board.
The Board would establish a rotation whereby each member would preside
over it one or two years. Three should form a quorum of the Board and it
should act normally by the majority of those voting.

The Board, I would further suggest, should delegate most of its
executive authority to a Premier who would exercise this power with the
help of a Cabinet of his own choosing until he lost the confidence of
either the House or the Senate. whereupon the Board would name another
Premier. I would give the Board power to dissolve either house or both
of them in order to call new elections, and I believe it should also
have a power of veto somewhat similar to that which the American
President has. I would make the Board commander-in-chief of the Union's
armed forces, and empower it with the consent of the Senate to conclude
treaties and name all the Union judges.

I would also have it report to the people and the Legislature from time
to time on the state of human freedom and of The Union, and on the
effects and need of change, and to recommend broadly measures and
policies. In short, I would entrust the more general and long term
duties of the executive to the Board and leave the more detailed and
short term duties to the Premier and Cabinet.

The aim of this system is threefold: First, to assure the supremacy of
the people and to provide strength, continuity, stability and foresight
in the executive while keeping it responsible to and representative of
the people. Second, to reassure all those who would be fearful of any
one man having too much power in The Union, or of all executive
authority being in the hands of, say, an American, or an Englishman, or
a Frenchman. Third, to avoid the unhealthy burden now placed on one man
by the American system, while enabling the head of The Union to fulfill
the liaison functions which the British royal family do to some extent
in the smaller British Commonwealth, and which would be much more
necessary in The Union. All members of the Board would be expected to
travel through the Union. It would be easy for the Board to arrange
rotation whereby one would be visiting the more distant parts of The
Union while another was visiting the less distant parts and the other
three were at the capital.[2] Such, broadly, are the aims of the system
I suggest. I believe few will object to these aims, and certainly I
would not object to any other system that promised to secure them better
than mine, or nearly as well.

The essentials to me here are that there be an independent Supreme
Court, that no controversies among member states be excluded from its
jurisdiction, and that the constitution be made explicitly the supreme
law of The Union. To attain these ends I would favor copying broadly the
method followed in the American Constitution. No doubt there would be
controversy over whether the Supreme Court should have the right to
invalidate laws as unconstitutional. I believe it should have this
right. The essential purpose of this right is, however, to keep the
constitution supreme -- to keep intact the division between the more
fundamental law which can be changed relatively slowly, the
Constitution, and the less fundamental law which can be changed
relatively quickly, the statutes. It would seem wiser to accept any
system that gives reasonable promise of attaining this purpose than to
delay or sacrifice The Union by controversy over the question of method.

Connected with the problem of the judiciary is the problem of how the
constitution shall be amended. Many of the objections made to the
American Supreme Court would be more justly aimed at the American
Constitution's amending mechanism. It makes that Constitution too hard
to change, too rigid, and it has for me the further disadvantages of
being based too much on the states as corporate bodies. All that has
been said of our Union's need to adapt itself more quickly to change
than the American Union needed to do when it began applies with special
force to the present problem. I would suggest that the constitution be
amended by majority vote of the voting citizens on proposals that had
gone through some preliminary scrutiny, with several choices open as to
the kind of scrutiny.

It would be expressly stipulated in the constitution, however, that
certain constitutional guarantees, such as the right of each nation to
conduct its own affairs in its own language and the right of each
citizen to freedom of speech and of the press, could not be lessened
without the consent of each nation.

Such are the main lines on which The Union could be constituted. Those
who desire to see how these proposals look when actually applied will
find in the annexes an illustrative draft constitution containing them.
It may give a better idea of them as a whole, and it provides an easy
means of indicating how various minor constitutional problems not
treated here might be solved.

____

1. Based on the white population since Negroes there lack the right to
vote.

2. Where should be the Union's capital? There would be advantages in
having a permanent one, and also in having the Legislature alternate
sessions there with sessions in each of the main parts of the Union.
This is one of the many questions best left to the Union to decide.

