The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 21: The Recent Days (1910-1914)
History
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 21: The Recent Days (1910-1914)
World history
We need to-day to draw the sharpest clear-cut line of demarcation
between Federal and State powers. This is in no spirit of antagonism,
but in the truest harmony for the best interests of both. It means an
illumination which will show that the "twilight zone," so called, does
not exist. This dark continent of legislation belongs absolutely to the
States and to the people in the unmistakable terms of the Tenth
Amendment: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the
Constitution or prohibited by it to the States are reserved to the
States, respectively, and to the people." This buffer territory of
legislation, the domain of needed uniform laws, belongs to the States
and through the House of Governors they may enter in and possess their
own. The Federal Government and the States are parts of one great
organization, each having its specific duties, powers, and
responsibilities, and between them should be no conflict, no inharmony.
Let the Federal Government, through Congress, make laws up to the very
maximum of its rights and duties under the Constitution; let the
States, taking up their neglected duties and privileges, relieve the
Government of those cares and responsibilities forced upon it by the
inactivity of the States and which it should never have had to assume.
With the burden thus equitably readjusted, with the dignity of the two
powers of Government working out their individual problems in the
harmony of a fuller understanding, let us face the results. If it then
seem, in the light of changed conditions from those of the time of the
writing of the Constitution, that certain control now held by the
States can not properly be exercised by them, that in final decision of
the best wisdom of the people this power should be vested in the
Federal Government, let the States not churlishly hold on to the casket
of a dead right, but surrender the living body of a responsibility and
a duty to the power best able to be its guardian. There are few, if
any, of their neglected powers of legislation that the States and the
people acting in cooperation, through the House of Governors, will not
be able to handle.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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