De Tocqueville closes his section on federal prerogatives by giving some examples suggesting that on some points (e.g., having a single national court to interpret the law and a single legislature to impose taxes on everyone and commercial regulations on the states), the American Union is more centralized in some ways than some European monarchies! Though this seems a bit of a stretch, maybe not. Perhaps De Tocqueville was echoing the earlier fears of the Anti-federalist “Brutus” when he suggests in the one-sentence section that follows (entitled “Federal Powers”) that it might be difficult to confine the national government to the exercise of its delegated powers? In sum, De Tocqueville’s preliminary remarks on the Constitution are generally sound and most helpful in drawing attention to the most important feature (and problem) of the constitutional order it established: the dual sovereignty embodied in the federal system. And in the last analysis, his cautionary suggestion about the difficulty of preventing future concentration of power in the national government would prove fully justified.

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