Experience has shown that this device [decentralization] is of extreme importance, for two reasons:  First, it is a powerful and the best means of training a people to efficient political action and the art of self-government; and, second, it presents constant and important barriers to the encroachment of rulers upon the rights and liberties of the nation; every subdivision forming a stronghold of resistance by the people against unjust or wicked rulers.  Take notice that any system of government is excellent in the precise degree in which it naturally trains the people in political independence, and habituates them to take an active part in governing themselves.  Whatever plan of government does this is good—­no matter what it may be called; and that which avoids this is necessarily bad.

What Mr. Nordhoff thus set forth has been universally acknowledged as the cardinal merit of local self-government; and in addition to this cardinal merit it has been recognized by all competent students of our history that our system of self-governing States has proved itself of inestimable benefit in another way.  It has rendered possible the trying of important experiments in social and governmental policy; experiments which it would have been sometimes dangerous, and still more frequently politically impossible, to inaugurate on a national scale.  When these experiments have proved successful, State after State has followed the example set by one or a few among their number; when they have been disappointing in their results, the rest of the Union has profited by the warning.  But, highly important as is this aspect of State independence, the most essential benefits of it are the training in self-government which is emphasized in the above quotation from Mr. Nordhoff, and the adaptation of laws to the particular needs and the particular character of the people of the various States.  That modern conditions have inevitably led to a vast enlargement of the powers of the central government, no thinking person can deny.  It would be folly to attempt to stick to the exact division of State functions as against national which was natural when the Union was first formed.  The railroad, the telegraph, and the telephone, the immense development of industrial, commercial, and financial organization, the growth of interwoven interests of a thousand kinds, have brought the people of California and New York, of Michigan and Texas, into closer relations than were common between those of Massachusetts and Virginia in the days of Washington and John Adams.  In so far as the process of centralization has been dictated by the clear necessities of the times, it would be idle to obstruct it or to cry out against it.  But, so far from this being an argument against the preservation of the essentials of local self-government, it is the strongest possible argument in favor of that preservation.  With the progress of science, invention, and business organization, the power and