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Centralization versus Decentralization.

A PAPER READ BY PROF. R. C. MINOR,

OF THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA.

I shall introduce my subject with an invitation to revert for one brief moment to the political conditions in this country during the last quarter of the eighteenth century.

Lord Cornwallis has surrendered at Yorktown the army that has so long harried and distressed the American Colonies, now independent States. The great war of the Revolution is ended, and in the first freedom from a yoke grown hateful, the people and the States hope all things.

But portentous clouds lower on the horizon, the heavens darken, the tempests begin to gather. "The United States, in Congress assembled" find that the government based upon the Articles of Confederation,-the ark that has borne them safely upon the flood of revolution,-is, now that they have reached a haven of peace and calm, about to founder in the deep waters of a public debt, a want of credit at home and of respect abroad, and a conflict of State commercial interests and regulations.

The cause is not far to seek. The government created by these Articles consists of a Congress of deputies or ambassadors from the several States, with few powers, and those mainly of an advisory nature, a government competent to act only through demands upon the States, with which the latter cannot be forced to comply. During the war, common danger and uncommon sense had supplied the place of force and energy in the Congress, but now that the strain is lifted, the government thus instituted is seen in its true light,—a rope of sand, that shall hold the States together only so long as their own selfish interests do not draw them apart.

Let the Union but break up into its component States, and they will be subjected to dangers greater than those just overcome and evils more serious than they have endured as Colonies.

The crisis is past. At the call of Virginia, who has yielded an empire to preserve even this pitiful semblance of a Union, the Federal Convention has met in Philadelphia, and after five months of secret debate, has recommended for ratification by the States the instrument which is to be the supreme law of the land.

The State Conventions have one by one met, ratified and adjourned, but in no instance without a warm debate and much opposition to the new constitution, due to the centralized character of the proposed government and to the fear often expressed that it would finally become too strong for the States, and would swallow up their reserved powers.

These prophecies have in the course of time been justified, and are being fulfilled more and more as the years go by. The party lines drawn in these conventions for and against the centralized power of the Federal Government have persisted ever since. The fight has been waged with various fortune, but with the ultimate advantage decidedly with the Centralists. The States have, in one way or another, been shorn of much of the power originally regarded as reserved to them; and the process of centralization still goes merrily on,-now by the gradual process of judicial construction, now by leaps and bounds, as when the passage of the fourteenth amendment cuts off at one blow a large slice of State power, or makes its exercise subject to the control of the federal courts.

The term "centralization of power," as applied to the Federal Government is commonly used in two distinct senses; and unless care be taken to indicate in which sense the speaker is using the term, confusion is apt to follow. The phrase may be used to mean merely an increased occasion for the exertion of powers admitted to have been granted to the general government; or it may signify a usurpation of powers, over and above those conceded to have been granted that government, and a corresponding decrease of the powers claimed to have been reserved by the States.