Only powers expressly yielded by the local units may be assumed by the Republic. The States were the minorities; they felt when they joined the Union that their rights as minorities had to be jealously guarded, in order that they might have the realities of self-government. You have in the rule that the small State must have as many Senators as the large State a sharp assertion of the right of geographical minorities. If the larger States had not accepted this principle the smaller States would never have joined the Union. Gradually these geographical minorities lost their importance in the public consciousness. Our people had come and kept coming to this country from the ends of the earth. Arriving here they continued to be nomads, sweeping over the West in search of new pasture lands or more fertile soil, moving from the farm to the city and thrusting their roots in nowhere. No difference of language or customs set up arbitrary frontiers. Moreover we were the first people to settle a land where modern methods of locomotion destroyed the use and wont of limited localities. Instead of being citizens of New York united with the citizens of New Jersey, Connecticut, and the rest of them for the common defense, as our forefathers imagined, we became citizens of the United States, which was divided into New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and the rest for purposes of policing, road-making, and other functions that could be better managed at home than from Washington. A State began to assume about the same place in the Union that a county does in a State. The basic reality for our forefathers was the State, the Union existing for the convenience of the States. The basic reality for us is the Union, the States existing for the convenience of the Union, which is too vast to administer everything from a central point. As the geographical subdivisions lost their significance economic subdivisions rose to take their place. The farmer of Kansas began to have more in common with the farmer of Iowa than he had with the coal miner of his own State. The nationwide organization of farmers resulted, and it is a more real unit in the political consciousness than is that unit on which the Fathers laid such stress, the State. It is a minority that has no reserve rights under the Constitution but which achieves its rights by force of numbers and organization. These economic subdivisions are the reality today. The United States is a union of the State of Agriculture, the State of Labor, the State of Manufacturing, and a dozen other occupational States of greater or less importance. And after all why should not Agriculture, Manufacturing, Labor, Foreign, and Domestic Commerce form a union for the national defense, carefully reserving essential powers to themselves as States, just as the thirteen original colonies did? Why should we let this new political organism keep us awake nights?