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.

Some of the subjects upon which free discussion tending toward uniform laws seems desirable are:  marriage and divorce, rights of married women, corporations and trusts, insurance, child labor, capital punishment, direct primaries, convict labor and labor in general, prison reforms, automobile regulations, contracts, banking, conveyancing, inheritance tax, income tax, mortgages, initiative, referendum and recall, election reforms, tax adjustment, and similar topics.  In great questions, like Conservation, the Federal Government has distinct problems it must carry out alone; there are some problems that must be solved by the States alone, some that may require to be worked out in cooperation.  But the greatest part of the needed conservation is that which belongs to the States, and which they can manage better, more thoroughly, more judiciously, with stronger appeal to State pride, upbuilding, and prosperity, with less conflict and clearer recognition of local needs and conditions and harmony with them than can the Federal Government.  Four-fifths of the timber standing in the country to-day is owned, not by the States or the Government, but by private interests.