oad-based and four-square, tapering upward to its final apex. A
sane and wholesome society begins with the family--natural or
artificial--which has original jurisdiction over a far greater series of
rights and privileges than it now commands. From the family certain
powers are delegated to the next higher social unit, the village or
communal group, which in its turn concedes certain of its inherent
rights to the organic group of communities, or states, and finally the
states commit to the last and general authority, the national
government, some of the elements of authority that have been delegated
to them. The principle of this delegation from one organism to another,
is common interest and welfare; only those functions which can be
performed with more even justice and with greater effectiveness, by the
community for example, than by the family, are so delegated. In the same
way the several groups commit to their common government only so much as
they cannot perform with due justice and equity to the others in the
same group. In the end the national government exists only that it may
provide for a limited number of national necessities, as for example,
defence against extra-national aggression, the conduct of diplomatic
relations with foreign powers, the maintaining of a national currency
and a national postal service, the provision of courts of last resort,
and the raising of revenue for the support of these few and explicit
functions.

The first step, it seems to me, towards governmental reform, is
decentralization, with a return to the States, the civic communities and
the individual citizens of nine-tenths of the powers and the
prerogatives that have been taken from them in defiance of abstract
justice, of the principles of free government and of the theory of the
workable unit of human scale. In a word we must abandon imperialism and
all its works and go back to the Federal Republic.

The second cause of our troubles lies, I believe, in the institution of
universal suffrage founded on the theory (or dogma) that the electoral
franchise is an inalienable right. This doctrine is of recent invention,
only coming into force during the "reconstruction period" following the
War between the States, when it was brought forward by certain leaders
of the Republican party to justify their enfranchisement of the negroes
in the hope that by this act they could fix their party in power to
perpetuity. In any case, the plan itsel