ion of the Governors of all the States,
meeting annually in conference as a deliberative body (with no
lawmaking power) for initiative, influence, and inspiration toward a
better, higher, and more unified Statehood. Its organization will be
simple and practical, avoiding red-tape, unnecessary formality, and
elaborate rules and regulations. It will adopt the few fundamental
expressions of its principles of action and the least number of rules
that are absolutely essential to enunciate its plan and scope, to
transmute its united wisdom into united action and to guarantee the
coherence, continuity, and permanence of the organization despite the
frequent changes in its membership due to the short terms of the
Executives in many of the States.

With the House of Governors rests the power of securing through the
cooperative action of the State legislatures uniform laws on vital
questions demanded by the whole country almost since the dawn of our
history, but heretofore impossible of enactment. The Federal Government
is powerless to pass these laws. For many decades, tight held by the
cramping bonds of Constitutional limitation, it has strained and
struggled, like Samson in the temple, to find some weak spot at which
it could free itself, and endangered the very supporting columns of the
edifice of the Republic. It was bound in its lawmaking powers to the
limitation of eighteen specific phrases, beyond which all power
remained with the States and the people. In the matter of enacting
uniform laws the States have been equally powerless, for, though their
Constitutional right to make them was absolute and unquestioned, no way
had been provided by which they could exercise that right. The States
as individuals, passing their own laws, without considering their
relation or harmony with the laws of other States, brought about a
condition of confusion and conflict. Laws that from their very nature
should be common to all of the States, in the best interests of all,
are now divergent, different, and antagonistic. We have to-day the
strange anomaly of forty-six States united in a union as integral parts
of a single nation, yet having many laws of fundamental importance as
different as though the States were forty-six distinct countries or
nationalities.

Facing the duality of incapacity--that of the Government because it was
not permitted to act and the States because they did not know how to
exercise the power they possessed--the F