Compared with the vast prerogatives of the state legislatures, these limitations seem small enough.  All the civil and religious rights of our citizens depend upon state legislation; the education of the people is in the care of the states; with them rests the regulation of the suffrage; they prescribe the rules of marriage, the legal relations of husband and wife, of parent and child; they determine the powers of masters over servants and the whole law of principal and agent, which is so vital a matter in all business transactions; they regulate partnership, debt and credit, insurance; they constitute all corporations, both private and municipal, except such as specially fulfill the financial or other specific functions of the federal government; they control the possession, distribution, and use of property, the exercise of trades, and all contract relations; and they formulate and administer all criminal law, except only that which concerns crimes committed against the United States, on the high seas, or against the law of nations.  Space would fail in which to enumerate the particulars of this vast range of power; to detail its parts would be to catalogue all social and business relationships, to examine all the foundations of law and order.[13]

[Footnote 13:  Woodrow Wilson, The State:  Elements of Historical and Practical Politics, p. 437.]

This enumeration, by Mr. Woodrow Wilson, is so much to the point that I content myself with transcribing it.  A very remarkable illustration of the preponderant part played by state law in America is given by Mr. Wilson, in pursuance of the suggestion of Mr. Franklin Jameson.[14] Consider the most important subjects of legislation in England during the present century, the subjects which make up almost the entire constitutional history of England for eighty years.  These subjects are Catholic emancipation, parliamentary reform, the abolition of slavery, the amendment of the poor-laws, the reform of municipal corporations, the repeal of the corn laws, the admission of Jews to parliament, the disestablishment of the Irish church, the alteration of the Irish land laws, the establishment of national education, the introduction of the ballot, and the reform of the criminal law.  In the United States only two of these twelve great subjects could be dealt with by the federal government:  the repeal of the corn laws, as being a question of national revenue and custom-house duties, and the abolition of slavery, by virtue of a constitutional amendment embodying some of the results of our Civil War.  All the other questions enumerated would have to be dealt with by our state governments; and before the war that was the case with the slavery question also.  A more vivid illustration could not be asked for.

[Footnote 14:  Jameson, “The Study of the Constitutional History of the States” J.H.U.  Studies, IV., v.]