Many important financiers and corporation lawyers are still bitterly opposed to any effective centralized regulation, even if accompanied by recognition; but such opposition is not merely inaccessible to the lessons of experience, but is blinded by theoretical prejudice.  Doubtless the position of being, on the one hand, inefficiently regulated by the state governments, and, on the other hand, of being efficiently protected in all their essential rights by the Federal courts—­doubtless such a situation seems very attractive to men who need a very free hand for the accomplishment of their business purposes; but they should be able to understand that it would necessarily produce endless friction.  The states may well submit to the constant extension of a protecting arm to corporations by the Federal courts, provided the central government is accomplishing more efficiently than can any combination of state governments the amount of supervision demanded by the public interest.  But if the Federal courts are to be constantly invoked, in order to thwart the will of state legislatures and commissions, and if at the same time the authority which protects either neglects or is unable effectively to supervise, there is bound to be a revival of anti-Federal feeling in its most dangerous form.  Whatever the corporations may suffer from the efficient exercise of Federal regulative powers, they have far more to fear from the action of the state governments—­provided such action proceeds from an irresponsible local radicalism embittered by being thwarted.  The public opinion on which the corporations must depend for fair treatment is national rather than local; and just in as far as they can be made subject to exclusive centralized jurisdiction, just to that extent is there a good chance of their gradual incorporation into a nationalized economic and legal system.

The control of the central government over commerce and the corporations should consequently be substituted for the control of the states rather than added thereto; and this action should be taken not in order to enfeeble American local governments, but to invigorate them.  The enjoyment by any public authority of a function which it cannot efficiently perform is always a source of weakness rather than of strength; and in this particular case it is a necessary source, not merely of weakness, but of corruption.  The less the state governments have to do with private corporations whose income is greater than their own, the better it will be for their morals, and the more effectively are they likely to perform their own proper and legitimate functions.  Several generations may well elapse before the American public opinion will learn this lesson; and even after it is well learned there will be enormous and peculiar obstacles to be removed before they can turn their instruction to good account.  But in the end the American Federal Constitution, like all the Federal Constitutions framed during the past century, will have to dispense with the distinction between state and inter-state commerce; and the national authority will prevail, not because there is any peculiar virtue in the action of the central government, but because there is a peculiar vice in asking the state governments to regulate matters beyond their effective jurisdiction.