That
the field is sufficiently wide will more fully appear when we come to
advert to the inconsiderable share of the public expenses for which it
will fall to the lot of the State governments to provide.
To argue upon abstract principles that this co-ordinate authority cannot
exist, is to set up supposition and theory against fact and reality.
However proper such reasonings might be to show that a thing OUGHT NOT
TO EXIST, they are wholly to be rejected when they are made use of to
prove that it does not exist contrary to the evidence of the fact
itself. It is well known that in the Roman republic the legislative
authority, in the last resort, resided for ages in two different
political bodies not as branches of the same legislature, but as
distinct and independent legislatures, in each of which an opposite
interest prevailed: in one the patrician; in the other, the plebian.
Many arguments might have been adduced to prove the unfitness of two
such seemingly contradictory authorities, each having power to ANNUL or
REPEAL the acts of the other. But a man would have been regarded as
frantic who should have attempted at Rome to disprove their existence.
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