its officers. 3.  A justice of the peace and constable. 4.  Each ward should take care of their own poor. 5.  Their own roads. 6.  Their own police. 7.  Elect within themselves one or more jurors to attend the courts of justice.  And, 8.  Give in at their Folk-house, their votes for all functionaries reserved to their election.  Each ward would thus be a small republic within itself, and every man in the State would thus become an acting member of the common government, transacting in person a great portion of its rights and duties, subordinate indeed, yet important and entirely within his competence.  The wit of man cannot devise a more solid basis for a free, durable, and well-administered republic.

With respect to our State and federal governments, I do not think their relations correctly understood by foreigners.  They generally suppose the former subordinate to the latter.  But this is not the case.  They are co-ordinate departments of one simple and integral whole.  To the State governments, are reserved all legislation and administration, in affairs which concern their own citizens only, and to the federal government is given whatever concerns foreigners, or the citizens of other States; these functions alone being made federal.  The one is the domestic, the other the foreign branch of the same government; neither having control over the other, but within its own department.  There are one or two exceptions only to this partition of power.  But you may ask, if the two departments should claim each the same subject of power, where is the common umpire to decide ultimately between them?  In cases of little importance or urgency, the prudence of both parties will keep them aloof from the questionable ground:  but if it can neither be avoided nor compromised, a convention of the States must be called, to ascribe the doubtful power to that department which they may think best.  You will perceive by these details, that we have not yet so far perfected our constitutions as to venture to make them unchangeable.  But still, in their present state, we consider them not otherwise changeable than by the authority of the people, on a special election of representatives for that purpose expressly:  they are until then the lex legum.

But can they be made unchangeable?  Can one generation bind another, and all others, in succession for ever?  I think not.  The Creator has made the earth for the living, not the dead.  Rights and powrers can only belong to persons, not to things, not to mere matter, unendowed with will.  The dead are not even things.  The particles of matter which composed their bodies, make part now of the bodies of other animals, vegetables, or minerals, of a thousand forms.  To what then are attached the rights and powers they held while in the form of men?  A generation may bind itself as long as its majority continues in life; when that has disappeared, another majority is in place, holds all the rights and powers their predecessors once held, and may change their laws and institutions to suit themselves.  Nothing then is unchangeable but the inherent and unalienable rights of man.