There are difficulties arising from our dual form of government. If they prove to be insuperable resort must be had to the power of amendment. Let us first try to meet them by an exercise of all the powers of the National Government which in the Marshall spirit of broad interpretation can be found in the Constitution as it is. They are of vast extent. The chief economic question of the day in this country is to provide a sovereign for the great corporations engaged in interstate business; that is, for the railroads and the interstate industrial corporations. At the moment our prime concern is with the railroads. When railroads were first built they were purely local in character. Their boundaries were not coextensive even with the boundaries of one State. They usually covered but two or three counties. All this has now changed. At present five great systems embody nearly four-fifths of the total mileage of the country. All the most important railroads are no longer State roads, but instruments of interstate commerce. Probably 85 per cent of their business is interstate business. It is the Nation alone which can with wisdom, justice, and effectiveness exercise over these interstate railroads the thorough and complete supervision which should be exercised. One of the chief, and probably the chief, of the domestic causes for the adoption of the Constitution was the need to confer upon the Nation exclusive control over interstate commerce. But this grant of power is worthless unless it is held to confer thoroughgoing and complete control over practically the sole instrumentalities of interstate commerce――the interstate railroads. The railroads themselves have been exceedingly shortsighted in the rancorous bitterness which they have shown against the resumption by the Nation of this long-neglected power. Great capitalists, who pride themselves upon their extreme conservatism, often believe they are acting in the interests of property when following a course so shortsighted as to be really an assault upon property. They have shown extreme unwisdom in their violent opposition to the assumption of complete control over the railroads by the Federal Government. The American people will not tolerate the happy-go-lucky system of no control over the great interstate railroads, with the insolent and manifold abuses which have so generally accompanied it. The control must exist somewhere; and unless it is by thoroughgoing and radical law placed upon the statute books of the Nation, it will be exercised in ever-increasing measure by the several States. The same considerations which made the founders of the Constitution deem it imperative that the Nation should have complete control of interstate commerce apply with peculiar force to the control of interstate railroads at the present day; and the arguments of Madison of Virginia, Pinckney of South Carolina, and Hamilton and Jay of New York, in their essence apply now as they