CHAPTER VI.

CURRENT QUESTIONS PRODUCTIVE OF CHANGES IN THE CONSTITUTION.

Iris, of course, impossible to foretell with accuracy the changes time may bring forth, which will materially modify and affect the organic law of the United States. Whatever development the United States, in the near future, may experience will necessarily come from within and not from outward pressure. Unlike the nations of Europe, the United States has no neighbor sufficiently powerful to affect its policy or to modify its constitution. It requires no standing army; and so long as England performs the police duties of the seas, it requires but little of a navy. It has no occasion to fear any serious foreign intervention, and it is therefore left freer than any other nation within the period of modern civilization to pursue its own development. In that respect its position is sui generis; nothing resembling it as a national power has ever appeared on the face of the earth, except the condition of savage

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tribes and insular nations, not brought within the influence of civilization, as to the severance of political interests from that of all other peoples. The good that is within it can, therefore, come to its ripest development: the evil that it contains, unless corrected, will bring its direst sinister consequences. The influence of foreign nations upon it are entirely of an industrial, intellectual, and commercial character.

A combination of circumstances beginning with the war of 1861, intensified by the extension of the means of intercommunication between the States by the railway and the telegraph, in conjunction with the natural and artificial waterways of the country, has made of the United States a solidified nation, within the generation last past, to an extent that was not anticipated by its founders, a consolidation much more complete than the theory of American institutions would seem to justify. State lines exist and will continue to exist for all purposes of penal and municipal law, except in so far as they may, as already shown in these pages, be overridden by the paramount law of the Union. Yet the traveler who starts in a railway train at Boston and remains in the same palace car until he arrives at San Francisco, travels through twelves States and Territories without noticing any State line, and rapidly

comes to regard the whole domain as his one country. The tendency of the times is necessarily to weaken the power of the State on the allegiance of the individual, and to lead to a greater and greater consolidation and unity of interest of the whole United States. This tendency is still further accelerated by the inability on the part of the individual States to deal with the economic and social questions which necessarily arise from the extension of the means of intercommunication between the States, and the necessity for the existence of a general power to deal with them. Already the States have felt and have, to a considerable degree, acknowledged their inability to deal with the railway and the telegraph question. The decisions of the Supreme Court in recent years, recognizing the inability on the part of the States to deal with these questions, have considerably extended the jurisdiction of this court over transportation routes lying partly within one State and partly within another, or upon a river running through two or more States. In the so-called Granger cases the Supreme Court has asserted jurisdiction in cases of all inter-State commerce in which goods or passengers are taken from one State beyond its own borders within the domain of another. This tendency will continue to consolidate the power of the United States upon all indus

trial and commercial matters as to which the States have a common interest, and for the purpose of putting that question at rest so that the United States may deal with that subject precisely as it deals with the subject of bankruptcy, a constitutional amendment will, in all probability, be adopted and acted upon, granting to the United States Government in express terms that which it already claims to have by implication, so that it may deal fearlessly and effectively with the important problems that arise from the organization of great monopoly interests which are incident to modern methods of the transportation of goods and passengers.

With the exception of the Pacific railways, all the railway corporations of the United States were chartered by the States, and though many of them have thousands of miles of line traversing many States, they claim their powers under the separate charters of the different States through which the lines run, and are in theory only amenable to the States covered by their lines of rails. Inequalities of rates, however, creating unjust discriminations between individuals of different States, and exercising a function analogous to that of taxing arbitrarily and without control, have and do create a power within the nation so great that it threatens sooner or later emphatically to dispute with the

authorities of the United States whether the railway or the governmental power is the greater. The State political machinery has to a very considerable degree already succumbed to the exercise of this power, and therefore to make head against it it will be found necessary to clothe the general Government with sufficient attributes of sovereignty to deal with the subject adequately.

That this necessity runs counter to a very correct theory of decentralization, and that the liberty of the individual is endangered by all centralization of power, is a truth to which thoughtful students of political history cannot shut their eyes. But precisely as in Germany a false decentralization of power had to be succeeded by a nation having centralized national power, with the view to intelligent and proper decentralization; so in time it may be necessary in many particulars to disregard State lines and the localizing of power resulting from such State lines, for the purpose of more intelligent and more effectual decentralization in those particulars wherein it is beneficial, and also to secure centralization in those matters wherein decentralization involves danger to the commonwealth.

The development of the taxing power arising from the war quadrupling the number of officeholders in the United States within the period from