Michigan : Its History and Government (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Michigan: Its History and Government

Up to the present time, no thorough and adequate history of Michigan has been written and very much material now comparatively easily accessible, has never been given careful and thorough consideration. This fact has increased very greatly the difficulty of prepar ing these few chapters. They represent, in spite of their brevity, a great amount of time and labor, as I have examined, with such care as time has permitted, all material to which I could gain access.

Another point that perhaps needs some explanation is the character of the work on the government of the state. I never have valued highly the ordinary work on Civil Government in our public schools. The com mitting to memory of the mere facts of government, without any understanding of the principles that under lie them or any knowledge of the processes through which they have come about, has not seemed to me a more valuable school exercise than the committing of any other comparatively unrelated facts. That such facts have practical value is largely a mistaken notion, and even if they have, most of the time spent upon them is waste time, because without any of our pedagogic efforts the average boy, by the time he is grown up, will know about everything that he ought to know of what the ordinary Civil Governments contain. The minutiae of Civil Government one learns from experience, so far as one needs to learn and remember them. In fact he must do so, if he learns them at all, for the details ofgovernmental affairs are constantly changing, and facts of this kind learned twenty-five years ago would now be so inaccurate as to be useless.

But there are many questions which people cannot answer for themselves, many things that they will not of themselves be able to understand. In the average community, for example, or among ordinarily well educated people, how many have any proper conception of the relation of the state and the nation? Or of the source of authority of a state government? Or of the difference in position with regard to its powers between the state and the national government? And dozens of other things of this kind. Great principles underlie all English and American political development, which it has taken the slow process of ages to unfold and make articulate in existing institutions. It is in the under standing of these principles and of their processes of development, rather than in the everyday details, that the field of Civil Government properly lies. It should be a science starting from its fundamental principles, as does chemistry or any other properly developed science, but taking more careful account of the historical proc esses involved.

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