The eighteenth century knew little or nothing about Federal Government. The Constitution of the United States, the parent of all the numerous later schemes of Federalism, was still in the limbo of the future; and it would be as idle to blame the Government of 1782 for not entering on a journey into the region of the unknown, especially at a moment of unexampled public difficulty, as it would be to blame the statesmen of the present day for not anticipating the political discoveries of the next generation, whatever they may prove to be. It was owing no doubt to the idea of Federal Government being practically unknown to the men of 1782, and to the unwillingness of the English mind to strike out on a new and as yet untrodden path in the art of Government, that in all the discussions of that time there is little or no suggestion of instituting a Federal link between Great Britain and Ireland. Some such suggestion was made during the negotiations on the Scotch Union, but it was decisively rejected by England, and only weakly urged by Scotland. The period was, in fact, one when Europe was still under the influence of a set of ideas which worked in an exactly opposite direction to the ideas of nationality and Federalism. The period was indeed drawing to a close; but the whole tendency of history had for two centuries previously been in the direction of large agglomerations of territory and centralization of government, quite irrespective of questions of nationality and race, and that tendency was still potent in 1782. The idea that the advantages of a national Government, extending over a large territory, might be combined with those of a decentralization of authority by a division of jurisdictions, was not one which the statesmen of the day in Europe had begun seriously to consider. Separation they understood, or an incorporate union: the possibility of an intermediate arrangement they ignored.
And yet an experiment in Federal Government is not to be approached with a light heart, and perhaps one thing only can be said about it with any certainty, that whatever success has attended it, wherever in fact it has worked smoothly, it has been when the powers reserved to the Federal or National Government have been those only which were strictly necessary, and in regard to which differences of opinion would presumably not arise amongst the States forming the Union.