DESTROYING OUR FEDERAL SYSTEM
THUS far I have been dealing with the wrong which the Prohibition
Amendment commits against the vital principle of any national
Constitution, the principle which alone justifies the idea of a
Constitution--a body of organic law removed from the operation of the
ordinary processes of popular rule and representative government. But
reference was made at the outset to a wrong of a more special, yet
equally profound, character. The distinctive feature of our system of
government is that it combines a high degree of power and independence
in the several States with a high degree of power and authority in the
national government. Time was when the dispute naturally arising in
such a Federal Union, concerning the line of division between these
two kinds of power, turned on an abstract or legalistic question of
State sovereignty. That abstract question was decided, once for all,
by the arbitrament of arms in our great Civil War. But the decision,
while it strengthened the foundations of the Federal Union, left
unimpaired the individuality, the vitality, the self-dependence of the
States in all the ordinary affairs of life. It continued to be true,
after the war as before, that each State had its own local pride,
developed its own special institutions, regulated the conduct of life
within its boundaries according to its own views of what was conducive
to the order, the well-being, the contentment, the progress, of its
own people. It has been the belief of practically all intelligent
observers of our national life that this individuality and
self-dependence of the States has been a cardinal element in the
promotion of our national welfare and in the preservation of our
national character. In a country of such vast extent and natural
variety, a country developing with unparalleled rapidity and
confronted with constantly changing conditions, who can say how great
would have been the loss to local initiative and civic spirit, how
grave the impairment of national concord and good will, if all the
serious concerns of the American people had been settled for them by a
central government at Washington ? In that admirable little book,
"Politics for Young Americans," Charles Nordhoff fifty years ago
expounded in simple language the principles underlying our system of
government. Coming to the subject of "Decentralization," he said:
Experience has shown that this device [decentralization] is of
extreme importance, for two reasons: First, it is a powerful and
the best means of training a people to efficient political action
and the art of self-government; and, second, it presents constant
and important barriers to the encroachment of rulers upon the
rights and liberties of the nation; every subdivision forming a
stronghold of resistance by the people against unjust or wicked
rulers. Take notice that any system of government is excellent in
the precise degree in which it naturally trains the people in
political independence, and habituates them to take an active part
in governing themselves. Whatever plan of government does this is
good--no matter what it may be called; and that which avoids this
is necessarily bad.
What Mr. Nordhoff thus set forth has been universally acknowledged as
the cardinal merit of local self-government; and in addition to this
cardinal merit it has been recognized by all competent students of our
history that our system of self-governing States has proved itself of
inestimable benefit in another way. It has rendered possible the
trying of important experiments in social and governmental policy;
experiments which it would have been sometimes dangerous, and still
more frequently politically impossible, to inaugurate on a national
scale. When these experiments have proved successful, State after
State has followed the example set by one or a few among their number;
when they have been disappointing in their results, the rest of the
Union has profited by the warning. But, highly important as is this
aspect of State independence, the most essential benefits of it are
the training in self-government which is emphasized in the above
quotation from Mr. Nordhoff, and the adaptation of laws to the
particular needs and the particular character of the people of the
various States. That modern conditions have inevitably led to a vast
enlargement of the powers of the central government, no thinking
person can deny. It would be folly to attempt to stick to the exact
division of State functions as against national which was natural when
the Union was first formed. The railroad, the telegraph, and the
telephone, the immense development of industrial, commercial, and
financial organization, the growth of interwoven interests of a
thousand kinds, have brought the people of California and New York, of
Michigan and Texas, into closer relations than were common between
those of Massachusetts and Virginia in the days of Washington and John
Adams. In so far as the process of centralization has been dictated by
the clear necessities of the times, it would be idle to obstruct it or
to cry out against it. But, so far from this being an argument against
the preservation of the essentials of local self-government, it is the
strongest possible argument in favor of that preservation. With the
progress of science, invention, and business organization, the power
and prestige of the central government are bound to grow, the power
and prestige of the State governments are bound to decline, under the
pressure of economic necessity and social convenience; all the more,
then, does it behoove us to sustain those essentials of State
authority which are not comprised within the domain of those
overmastering economic forces. If we do not hold the line where the
line can be held, we give up the cause altogether; and it will be only
a question of time when we shall have drifted into complete subjection
to a centralized government, and State boundaries will have no more
serious significance than county boundaries have now. But if there is
one thing in the wide world the control of which naturally and
preeminently belongs to the individual State and not to the central
government at Washington, that thing is the personal conduct and
habits of the people of the State. If it is right and proper that the
people of New York or Illinois or Maryland shall be subjected to a
national law which declares what they may or may not eat or drink--a
law which they cannot themselves alter, no matter how strongly they
may desire it--then there is no act of centralization whatsoever which
can be justly objected to as an act of centralization. The Prohibition
Amendment is not merely an impairment of the principle of
self-government of the States; it constitutes an absolute abandonment
of that principle. This does not mean, of course, an immediate
abandonment of the practice of State self-government; established
institutions have a tenacious life, and moreover there are a thousand
practical advantages in State selfgovernment which nobody will think
of giving up. But the principle, I repeat, is abandoned altogether if
we accept the Eighteenth Amendment as right and proper; and if anybody
imagines that the abandonment of the principle is of no practical
consequence, he is woefully deluded. So long as the principle is held
in esteem, it is always possible to make a stout fight against any
particular encroachment upon State authority; any proposed
encroachment must prove its claim to acceptance not only as a
practical desideratum but as not too flagrant an invasion of State
prerogatives. But with the Eighteenth Amendment accepted as a proper
part of our system, it will be impossible to object to any invasion as
more flagrant than that to which the nation has already given its
approval. A striking illustration of this has, curiously enough, been
furnished in the brief time that has passed since the adoption or the
eighteenth Amendment. Southern Senators and Representatives and
Legislaturemen who, for getting all about their cherished doctrine of
State rights, had fallen over themselves in their eagerness to fasten
the Eighteenth Amendment upon the country, suddenly discovered that
they were deeply devoted to that doctrine when the Nineteenth
Amendment came up for consideration. But nobody would listen to them.
They professed--and doubtless some of them sincerely professed--to
find an essential difference between putting Woman Suffrage into the
Constitution and putting Prohibition into the Constitution. The
determination of the right of suffrage was, they said, the most
fundamental attribute of a sovereign State; national Prohibition did
not strike at the heart of State sovereignty as did national
regulation of the suffrage. But the abstract question of sovereignty
has had little interest for the nation since the Civil War; and if we
waive that abstract question, the Prohibition Amendment was an
infinitely more vital thrust at the principle of State selfgovernment.
The Woman Suffrage Amendment was the assertion of a fundamental
principle of government, and if it was an abridgment of sovereignty it
was an abridgment of the same character as those embodied in the
Constitution from the beginning, the Prohibition Amendment brought the
Federal Government into control of precisely those intimate concerns
of daily life which, above all else, had theretofore been left
untouched by the central power, and subject to the independent
jurisdiction of each individual State. The South had eagerly swallowed
a camel, and when it asked the country to strain at a gnat it found
nobody to listen. Our public men, and our leaders of opinion,
frequently and earnestly express their concern over the decline of
importance in our State governments, the lessened vigor of the State
spirit. The sentiment is not peculiar to any party or to any section;
it is expressed with equal emphasis and with equal frequency by
leading Republicans and leading Democrats, by Northerners and
Southerners. All feel alike that with the decay of State spirit a
virtue will go out of our national spirit--that a centralized America
will be a devitalized America. But when they discuss the subject, they
are in the habit of referring chiefly to defects in administration; to
neglect of duty by the average citizen or perhaps by those in high
places in business or the professions; to want of intelligence in the
Legislature, etc. And for all this there is much reason; yet all this
we have had always with us, and it is not always that we have had with
us this sense of the decline of State spirit. For that decline the
chief cause is the gradual, yet steady and rapid, extension of
national power and lowering of the comparative importance of the
functions of the State. However, the functions that still remain to
the State--and its subdivisions, the municipalities and counties --are
still of enormous importance; and, with the growth of public-welfare
activities which are ramifying in so many directions, that importance
may be far greater in the future. But what is to become of it if we
are ready to surrender to the central government the control of our
most intimate concerns? And what concern can be so intimate as that of
the conduct of the individual citizen in the pursuit of his daily
life? How can the idea of the State as an object of pride or as a
source of authority flourish when the most elementary of its functions
is supinely abandoned to the custody of a higher and a stronger power?
The Prohibition Amendment has done more to sap the vitality of our
State system than could be done by a hundred years of misrule at
Albany or Harrisburg or Springfield. The effects of that misrule are
more directly apparent, but they leave the State spirit untouched in
its vital parts. The Prohibition Amendment strikes at the root of that
spirit, and its evil precedent, if unreversed, will steadily cut off
the source from which that spirit derives its life.