Centralization versus Decentralization

Thirteen years ago, the American Political Science Association directed its attention to the changing relation between our national government and the states. One of the speakers discerned in the tendency toward aggrandizement of national power, manifestations of the principle that sovereignity, unprovided for in extant forms, seeks to embody itself in new forms. The signal incompetence of the states in dealing with economic questions, together with their mendicant attitude towards the national government, was seen as the cause of the transfer to national authority of control over currency supply, transportation rates and methods, and the seeming disposition to transfer control over all corporations. Other speakers called attention to the great increase of national power under the commerce clause and under the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution; and one, in a most thoughtful paper, openly challenged the federal system as established in this country, asserting that it showed disadvantages of increasing magnitude in comparison with a unitary system, and was out of harmony with the general environment of modern industrialism.