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between two sets of communities alike in all their inheritance and
tendency. In any case, how much weight shall still be attached to
"States Rights," and how much shall we press for a uniform life
throughout all the land? What shall be the special duties of each
local community toward its common needs of education, of recreation,
of moral protection, and social order? How much in any given place
shall the tendency of neighbors to be unwilling to testify against
each other when wrong-doing is practised, and unable to withstand any
evil influence when near the centre of its working, lead us to unite
in demanding a larger unit for the Juvenile Court or the enforcement
of laws against commercialized vice or any other social concern where
justice demands a free hand and no favor to any group? These are
questions with which some of our volunteer agencies of social work
have wrestled. The answers that wise and good people have made to them
should have weight in any decision we may make as to the right and
effective divisions of law and its enforcement in our American system.
This problem of division of authority has within it a puzzling
counter-interpretation of our original Constitution and of our history
up to date. The doctrine of "States Rights," it is said, received its
death blow in the Civil War, but the equal political and civil rights
of the negro, which that war was supposed to establish as a national
concern, vary with the varying attitudes of people of the different
states toward the enforcement of the Constitutional Amendments which
were intended to secure those rights. The Southern States, it is said,
still stand for the dignity and autonomy of each Commonwealth in
matters of restriction upon labor and of provision for tax-supported
education, but the inner stronghold of the Federal Prohibition
Amendment is the section of the country south of Mason and Dixon's
line. The new States, again it is said, are more tenacious of national
centralization of government because more evidently drawing their
powers from the federal centre, but in the valley of the Mississippi
from north to south,--that section which promises to have the
determination of the course of American history in its hands for the
next hundred years,--there are signs that the state autonomy and the
state jealousy of invasion of local authority in the interest of
national conformity to federal law are not by any means unknown.
There should be s