never willingly surrender them, yet the surrender of a right is often the brave recognition of a higher duty, the fine assumption of a higher privilege.  In many phases the need grew urgent, something had to be done.  By ingeniously tapping the Constitution to find a weak place and hammering it thin by decisions, by interpretations, by liberal readings, by technical evasions and other methods, needed laws were passed in the interests of the people and the States.  Many of these laws would not stand the rigid scrutiny of the Supreme Court; to many of them the Government’s title may now be valid by a kind of “squatter’s sovereignty” in legislation,—­merely so many years of undisputed possession.

This was not the work of one administration; it ran with intermittent ebb and flow through many administrations.  Then the slumbering States, turning restlessly in their complacency, at last awoke and raised a mighty cry of “Centralization.”  They claimed that the Government was taking away their rights, which may be correct in essence but hardly just in form; they had lost their rights, primarily, not through usurpation but through abrogation; the Government had acted because of the default of the States, it had practically been forced to exercise powers limited to the States because the States lapsed through neglect and inaction.  Then the Government discovered the vulnerable spot in our great charter, the Achilles heel of the Constitution.  It was just six innocent-looking words in section eight empowering Congress to “regulate commerce between the several States.”  It was a rubber phrase, capable of infinite stretching.  It was drawn out so as to cover antitrust legislation, control and taxation of corporations, water-power, railroad rates, etc., pure-food law, white-slave traffic, and a host of others.  But even with the most generous extension of this phrase, which, though it may be necessary, was surely not the original intent of the Constitution, the greatest number of the big problems affecting the welfare of the people are still outside the province of the Government and are up to the States for solution.

It was to meet this situation, wherein the Government and the States as individuals could not act, that the simple, self-evident plan of the House of Governors was proposed.  It required no Constitutional amendment or a single new law passed in any State to create it or to continue it.  It can not make laws; it would be unwise for it to make them even were it possible.  Its sole power is as a mighty moral influence, as a focusing point for public opinion and as a body equal to its opportunity of transforming public opinion into public sentiment and inspiring legislatures to crystallize this sentiment into needed laws.  It will live only as it represents the people, as it has their sympathy, support, and cooperation, as it seeks to make the will of the people prevail.  But this means a longer, stronger, finer life than any mere legal authority could give it.