The South’s position rests upon a foundation of law, history, and constitutional construction as old as the Union itself. Ours is the ancient doctrine of State powers--not of State rights, but of State _powers_. This principle is the _élan vital_ of the American Republic; it takes in the whole body of governmental and philosophical principles by which American greatness has been achieved. The doctrine embraces that delicate balance in State and Federal relations which keeps the whole watchworks moving; it depends for its success upon the right of the States to be wrong--to be foolish, to be unwise, to be out of step, to do “those acts and things which independent States may of right do,” simply because they are States. And unless this delicate balance is preserved, and the rightful powers of the States guarded from continued encroachment, the whole organism of American government will be subtly transformed, without the expressed consent of the people governed, from the federalism that has provided its greatest strength to an immoderate centralism that will prove its greatest weakness. In maintaining its case, the South is no longer fighting the question of separate schools or even a question of race relations at all; it is contending, rather, for the preservation of an American plan of value to all the States and all the people. What is lost to the Southern States, in terms of political powers, is lost to all States; and the imposition of court-ordered prohibitions in one field makes the next imposition that much easier. By the court’s decree of 1954, the South’s largest, most expensive, most important, most cherished public institutions--our public schools--were thrown into potential jeopardy and chaos. Whose most cherished institutions will be next? II The South’s legal position in the school controversy is essentially a constitutional position; it cannot be fully understood without some understanding of how the Southerner views the Constitution. He views it through the eyes of the States. These are to him, as Oliver Wolcott of Connecticut called them, “the pillars which uphold the general system.” Most readers of this essay, it may be assumed, have a good working knowledge of the Constitution. Some will not; they may never have read the Constitution, line by line and word by word; they know its provisions vaguely, not explicitly, and the trail that led from the creation of States to the formation of a Union is as remote to them as a path through the Pleiades. Hence this hornbook review. And if Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence seems irrelevant to the South’s position in _Brown_ v. _Board of Education_, it is only because too much emphasis has been put on the Declaration’s first few lines and not enough on its last.