central government are not those which the states
happen to perform badly. They are those which the states, even with the
best will in the world, cannot be expected to perform satisfactorily;
and among these functions the regulation of commerce, the organization
of labor, and the increasing control over property in the public
interest are assuredly to be included. The best friends of local
government in this country are those who seek to have its activity
confined with the limits of possible efficiency, because only in case
its activity is so confined can the states continue to remain an
essential part of a really efficient and well-cooerdinated national
organization.

Proposals to increase the powers of the central government are, however,
rarely treated on their merits. They are opposed by the majority of
American politicians and newspapers as an unqualified evil. Any attempt
to prove that the existing distribution of responsibility is necessarily
fruitful of economic and political abuses, and that an increase of
centralized power offers the only chance of eradicating these abuses is
treated as irrelevant. It is not a question of the expediency of a
specific proposal, because from the traditional point of view any
change in the direction of increased centralization would be a violation
of American democracy. Centralization is merely a necessary evil which
has been carried as far as it should, and which cannot be carried any
further without undermining the foundations of the American system. Thus
the familiar theory of many excellent American democrats is rather that
of a contradictory than a constructive relation between the democratic
and the national ideals. The process of nationalization is perverted by
them into a matter merely of centralization, but the question of the
fundamental relation between nationality and democracy is raised by
their attitude, because the reasons they advance against increasingly
centralized authority would, if they should continue to prevail,
definitely and absolutely forbid a gradually improving cooerdination
between American political organization and American national economic
needs or moral and intellectual ideals. The conception of democracy out
of which the supposed contradiction between the democratic and national
ideals issues is the great enemy of the American national advance, and
is for that reason the great enemy of the real interests of democracy.

To be sure, any increase