public condemnation, are praised by
the unthinking as far-sighted statesmanship. It is popular nowadays to
apply the term "forward-looking" to people who would make the National
Government an agency for social-welfare work, and to characterize as
"lacking in vision" anyone who interposes a constitutional principle in
the path of a social reform. Friends of progress sometimes forget that
the real forward-looking man is he who can see the pitfall ahead as well
as the rainbow; the man of true vision is one whose view of the stars is
steadied by keeping his feet firmly on the ground.

It cannot be reiterated too often that, under our political system,
legislation in the nature of police regulation (except in so far as it
affects commerce or foreign relations) is the province of the states,
not of the National Government. This is not merely sound constitutional
law; it is good sense as well. Regulations salutary for Scandinavian
immigrants of the northwest may not fit the Creoles of Louisiana. In the
long run the police power will be exercised most advantageously for all
concerned by local authority.

The present tendency toward centralization cannot go on indefinitely. A
point must be reached sooner or later when an over-centralized
government becomes intolerable and breaks down of its own weight. As an
eminent authority has put it: "If we did not have states we should
speedily have to create them."[1] The states thus created, however,
would not be the same. They would be mere governmental subdivisions,
without the independence, the historic background, the traditions, or
the sentiment of the present states. These influences, hitherto so
potent in our national life, would have been lost.

[Footnote 1: Address of Supreme Court Justice Charles E. Hughes before
New York State Bar Association, January 14, 1916.]

In a memorable address delivered in the year 1906 before the
Pennsylvania Society in New York, Elihu Root, then Secretary of State in
President Roosevelt's Cabinet, discussed the encroachments of federal
power and expressed the view that the only way in which the states could
maintain their power and authority was by awakening to a realization of
their own duties to the country at large. He said:

The Governmental control which they (the people) deem just and
necessary they will have. It may be that such control would
better be exercised in particular instances by the governments
of the states,