It is an essential theory of our constitutional system that the relations between the Union and the States are determined by the Constitution of the United States, and hence that the powers of the government of the one may be neither increased nor diminished (except in the few instances provided for in the Constitution) by the action of the government of the other. How far this theory has been actually embodied in law it is important to inquire in regard to all three functions of government, legislation, jurisdiction, and administration, but the present discussion will be limited to illustrations of the delegation of legislative power by congress to the States. The acts of congress with which we are here concerned form three distinct classes: those involving the concurrent powers of the States which may be exercised in the absence of conflicting congressional legislation; those involving powers of the States which may be exercised only by reason of some positive action of congress; and, last, a class in which there is an adoption of laws of the States as laws of the United States.

When the Fathers were framing the Constitution of the United States they sought at every turn to safeguard the interests of the people and at the same time secure to officials a reasonable degree of independence. This solicitude was especially manifest in the case of judicial officers, whose terms were made to run during good behavior. Impeachment was the method adopted to determine what constituted misbehavior. Chief Justice Marshall early laid down the principle that terms otherwise undefined in the Constitution were used in the sense which was well known and accepted at the time the Constitution was written. Impeachment was adopted and adapted from the English practice. To understand our own law, then, it is necessary to know what the English law of impeachment, the lex et consuetudo parliamenti, was at the time of its adoption and in what way it was modified or changed in being adopted.

The title bürgermeister first appears in German municipal history during the early part of the thirteenth century, but the exact nature of the tasks imposed upon the official at this period still remains obscured in the darkness of the Middle Ages. We know that there were such officers, and we know something as to the method of their election, but very little as to the extent of their real power. Probably, however, as Von Maurer suggests, the bürgermeister had originally no other duty than that of presiding over the civic council, a simple function, to which came later to be added a general oversight of current affairs and the enforcing of city ordinances.

Considerably more, however, may be learned as to the duties of this officer in the seventeenth century, when the franchise had become more and more restricted and the number of town officers much smaller, and when, partly as a result of this decrease and partly in consequence of the awakening industrial life of the period, there had come to be an increase in the importance of town officials, and naturally among the rest in that of the chief magistrate.