ns, both private and municipal, except such as specially
fulfill the financial or other specific functions of the federal
government; they control the possession, distribution, and use of
property, the exercise of trades, and all contract relations; and they
formulate and administer all criminal law, except only that which
concerns crimes committed against the United States, on the high seas,
or against the law of nations. Space would fail in which to enumerate
the particulars of this vast range of power; to detail its parts would
be to catalogue all social and business relationships, to examine all
the foundations of law and order.[13]

[Footnote 13: Woodrow Wilson, _The State: Elements of Historical and
Practical Politics_, p. 437.]

This enumeration, by Mr. Woodrow Wilson, is so much to the point that I
content myself with transcribing it. A very remarkable illustration of
the preponderant part played by state law in America is given by Mr.
Wilson, in pursuance of the suggestion of Mr. Franklin Jameson.[14]
Consider the most important subjects of legislation in England during
the present century, the subjects which make up almost the entire
constitutional history of England for eighty years. These subjects are
Catholic emancipation, parliamentary reform, the abolition of slavery,
the amendment of the poor-laws, the reform of municipal corporations,
the repeal of the corn laws, the admission of Jews to parliament, the
disestablishment of the Irish church, the alteration of the Irish land
laws, the establishment of national education, the introduction of the
ballot, and the reform of the criminal law. In the United States only
two of these twelve great subjects could be dealt with by the federal
government: the repeal of the corn laws, as being a question of national
revenue and custom-house duties, and the abolition of slavery, by virtue
of a constitutional amendment embodying some of the results of our Civil
War. All the other questions enumerated would have to be dealt with by
our state governments; and before the war that was the case with the
slavery question also. A more vivid illustration could not be asked for.

[Footnote 14: Jameson, "The Study of the Constitutional
History of the States" _J.H.U. Studies_, IV., v.]

How complete is the circle of points in which the state touches the
life of the American citizen, we may see in the fact that our
state courts make a complete judiciary system, from top to botto