The House of Governors is a union of the Governors of all the States, meeting annually in conference as a deliberative body (with no lawmaking power) for initiative, influence, and inspiration toward a better, higher, and more unified Statehood.  Its organization will be simple and practical, avoiding red-tape, unnecessary formality, and elaborate rules and regulations.  It will adopt the few fundamental expressions of its principles of action and the least number of rules that are absolutely essential to enunciate its plan and scope, to transmute its united wisdom into united action and to guarantee the coherence, continuity, and permanence of the organization despite the frequent changes in its membership due to the short terms of the Executives in many of the States.

With the House of Governors rests the power of securing through the cooperative action of the State legislatures uniform laws on vital questions demanded by the whole country almost since the dawn of our history, but heretofore impossible of enactment.  The Federal Government is powerless to pass these laws.  For many decades, tight held by the cramping bonds of Constitutional limitation, it has strained and struggled, like Samson in the temple, to find some weak spot at which it could free itself, and endangered the very supporting columns of the edifice of the Republic.  It was bound in its lawmaking powers to the limitation of eighteen specific phrases, beyond which all power remained with the States and the people.  In the matter of enacting uniform laws the States have been equally powerless, for, though their Constitutional right to make them was absolute and unquestioned, no way had been provided by which they could exercise that right.  The States as individuals, passing their own laws, without considering their relation or harmony with the laws of other States, brought about a condition of confusion and conflict.  Laws that from their very nature should be common to all of the States, in the best interests of all, are now divergent, different, and antagonistic.  We have to-day the strange anomaly of forty-six States united in a union as integral parts of a single nation, yet having many laws of fundamental importance as different as though the States were forty-six distinct countries or nationalities.

Facing the duality of incapacity—­that of the Government because it was not permitted to act and the States because they did not know how to exercise the power they possessed—­the Federal Government sought new power for new needs through Constitutional amendments.  This effort proved fruitless and despairing, for with more than two thousand attempts made in over a century only three amendments were secured, and these were merely to wind up the Civil War.  The whole fifteen amendments taken together have not added the weight of a hair of permanent new power to the Federal Government.  The people and the States often sleep serenely on their rights, but they