THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 1907. FEDERAL AND STATE RIGHTS.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXX, Issue 8535, 14 September 1907, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 1907. FEDERAL AND STATE RIGHTS.

Just when fie best minds in tho United Sta'e? are recognising more aid more clearly the necessity for reinforcing the central authority, some of .the States appear to be bent 1 upon asserting State rights in the mist uncompromising way. Everything at present tends to make a great standing controversy of American politics extraordinarily acute, bjt that is possibly the inevitable preliminary of any kind of satisfactory settlement. In North Carolina the assertion of State rights in matters net exclusively the interest of any State threatens domestic and commercial trouble of a serious kind. In California the same unqualified pushing of State rights contains the menace of grave international complications. In both cases the object I • • lesson arouses considerable misgiving even amorg hitherto convinced upholders of State as against Federal I authority. The dispute runs upen the old line of cleavage between Republicans and Democrats, but it is probable tht:t there will be consideraile re-arrangement of the disputants upon either side. It is sometimes said that the written Constitution, though it has conferred great benefits upon the American people, opposes an almost insuperable barrier to reforms the need for which no human sagacity could have foreseen when it was settled. That difficulty is probably exaggerated. The Constitution, like the House of Lords, opposes an obstacle to hasty and ill-considered changes, but neither the one nor the other can prevent changes which the weight of circumstances compels a whole people to regard as desirable. Nothing is more marked in the his-

Tory of "mankind than the complete reversal of interpretation of, and practical deductions from, a formula which may be effected without any change in its letter.