Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER m THE STATE GOVERNMENTS Place of the States in Our Federal System.—Proceeding upward from the county, township, and city, we come to the state, the authority to which the local governments described in the preceding chapters are all subject. The consideration of state .government properly precedes the study of national government, not only because the states existed before the national government did, and in a sense furnished the models upon which it was constructed, but because their governments regulate the larger proportion of our public affairs and hence concern more vitally the interests of the mass of people than does the national government. The states collectively make up our great republic, but they are not mere administrative districts of the union created for convenience in carrying on the affairs of national government. They do not, for example, bear the same relation to the union that a county does to the state, or a township to the county. A county is nothing more than a district carved out of the state for administrative convenience, and provided with such an organization and given such powers of local government as the state may choose to give it. The states, on the other hand, are not creations of the national government; their place as constituent members of the union is determined by the FederalConstitution, framed by the people of the United States, and their rights and obligations are fixed by the same authority. Each state, however, determines its own form of government and decides for itself what activities it will undertake. Division of Powers.—The Federal Constitution has marked out a definite sphere of power for the states, on the one hand, and another sphere for the national government on the other, and each within its sphere is supreme...