A Guide to the Right Understanding OF OUR AMERICAN UNION; OR, Political, Economical and Literary Miscellanies.... DEDICATED TO THE YOUNG MEN OF AMERICA: BY A. B. JOHNSON, AUTHOR OF" AN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF INSTRUCTION; OR, APOLOGUES AND BREVIATS ON MAN PUBLIC LIBRARY ASTOR, LENOX AND Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1857, BY DERBY & JACKSON, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States, for the Southern District of New-York. PREFACE. To no people is political knowledge so important as to us—each citizen being both sovereign and subject. Our duty as subjects, we, like the subjects of other countries, are taught by legislative enactments; but our duty in assisting to enact laws and form written constitutions, we can learn only by study; especially as laws desirable for a State may be fundamentally improper for the Federal Gov. ernment. This conflict of proprieties is misunderstood universally by foreigners-their pre-existing notions of nationalities mystifying our Federal limitations-while the same difficulty, existing ratably among ourselves, disturbs the fellowship of our thirty millions of inhabitants, and endangers the union of our States. The present publication discusses most of those governmental peculiarities that our progress has shown to be disturbing, guiding us thus, by a practical detail, to a better understanding of our polity than could any treatise on Government, written systematically in abstract general propositions. The essays assume a partisan guise, because conflicting governmental notions are the elements of our party differences; but the |