metimes by an assertion of the inter-State commerce power,
sometimes by an assertion of the taxing power, the national
government is taking up the performance of duties which under the
changed conditions the separate States are no longer capable of
adequately performing."

"We are urging forward in a development of business and social life
which tends more and more to the obliteration of State lines and
the decrease of State power as compared with national power."

"It is useless for the advocates of State rights to inveigh against
... the extension of national authority in the fields of necessary
control where the States themselves fail in the performance of
their duty."

He is not announcing a policy; he is not forecasting what a party of
planners will bring about; he is merely telling what the people will
require and compel. And he could have added--which would be perfectly
true--that the people will not be moved to it by speculation and
cogitation and planning, but by _Circumstance_--that power which
arbitrarily compels all their actions, and over which they have not the
slightest control.

_"The end is not yet."_

It is a true word. We are on the march, but at present we are only just
getting started.

If the States continue to fail to do their duty as required by the
people--

" ... _constructions of the Constitution will be found_ to vest the
power where it will be exercised--in the national government."

I do not know whether that has a sinister meaning or not, and so I will
not enlarge upon it lest I should chance to be in the wrong. It sounds
like ship-money come again, but it may not be so intended.

Human nature being what it is, I suppose we must expect to drift into
monarchy by and by. It is a saddening thought, but we cannot change our
nature: we are all alike, we human beings; and in our blood and bone,
and ineradicable, we carry the seeds out of which monarchies and
aristocracies are grown: worship of gauds, titles, distinctions, power.
We have to worship these things and their possessors, we are all born
so, and we cannot help it. We have to be despised by somebody whom we
regard as above us, or we are not happy; we have to have somebody to
worship and envy, or we cannot be content. In America we manifest this
in all the ancient and customary ways. In public we scoff at titles and
hereditary privilege, but privately we hanker after t