The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) | Page 9

permanence of the organization despite the frequent
changes in its membership due to the short terms of the Executives in
many of the States.
With the House of Governors rests the power of securing through the
cooperative action of the State legislatures uniform laws on vital
questions demanded by the whole country almost since the dawn of our
history, but heretofore impossible of enactment. The Federal
Government is powerless to pass these laws. For many decades, tight
held by the cramping bonds of Constitutional limitation, it has strained
and struggled, like Samson in the temple, to find some weak spot at
which it could free itself, and endangered the very supporting columns

of the edifice of the Republic. It was bound in its lawmaking powers to
the limitation of eighteen specific phrases, beyond which all power
remained with the States and the people. In the matter of enacting
uniform laws the States have been equally powerless, for, though their
Constitutional right to make them was absolute and unquestioned, no
way had been provided by which they could exercise that right. The
States as individuals, passing their own laws, without considering their
relation or harmony with the laws of other States, brought about a
condition of confusion and conflict. Laws that from their very nature
should be common to all of the States, in the best interests of all, are
now divergent, different, and antagonistic. We have to-day the strange
anomaly of forty-six States united in a union as integral parts of a
single nation, yet having many laws of fundamental importance as
different as though the States were forty-six distinct countries or
nationalities.
Facing the duality of incapacity--that of the Government because it was
not permitted to act and the States because they did not know how to
exercise the power they possessed--the Federal Government sought
new power for new needs through Constitutional amendments. This
effort proved fruitless and despairing, for with more than two thousand
attempts made in over a century only three amendments were secured,
and these were merely to wind up the Civil War. The whole fifteen
amendments taken together have not added the weight of a hair of
permanent new power to the Federal Government. The people and the
States often sleep serenely on their rights, but they never willingly
surrender them, yet the surrender of a right is often the brave
recognition of a higher duty, the fine assumption of a higher privilege.
In many phases the need grew urgent, something had to be done. By
ingeniously tapping the Constitution to find a weak place and
hammering it thin by decisions, by interpretations, by liberal readings,
by technical evasions and other methods, needed laws were passed in
the interests of the people and the States. Many of these laws would not
stand the rigid scrutiny of the Supreme Court; to many of them the
Government's title may now be valid by a kind of "squatter's
sovereignty" in legislation,--merely so many years of undisputed
possession.
This was not the work of one administration; it ran with intermittent

ebb and flow through many administrations. Then the slumbering
States, turning restlessly in their complacency, at last awoke and raised
a mighty cry of "Centralization." They claimed that the Government
was taking away their rights, which may be correct in essence but
hardly just in form; they had lost their rights, primarily, not through
usurpation but through abrogation; the Government had acted because
of the default of the States, it had practically been forced to exercise
powers limited to the States because the States lapsed through neglect
and inaction. Then the Government discovered the vulnerable spot in
our great charter, the Achilles heel of the Constitution. It was just six
innocent-looking words in section eight empowering Congress to
"regulate commerce between the several States." It was a rubber phrase,
capable of infinite stretching. It was drawn out so as to cover antitrust
legislation, control and taxation of corporations, water-power, railroad
rates, etc., pure-food law, white-slave traffic, and a host of others. But
even with the most generous extension of this phrase, which, though it
may be necessary, was surely not the original intent of the Constitution,
the greatest number of the big problems affecting the welfare of the
people are still outside the province of the Government and are up to
the States for solution.
It was to meet this situation, wherein the Government and the States as
individuals could not act, that the simple, self-evident plan of the
House of Governors was proposed. It required no Constitutional
amendment or a single new law passed in any State to create it or to
continue it. It can not make laws; it would be unwise for it to make
them even were it possible. Its sole power is as a mighty moral