The daily morning journal and courier., 1906-10-05

] In a remarkable letter in which he
 advocated setting forth in early and | clear fashion the powers of the nation
 al government, he laid down the pro-
 posttion that it should be made clear
 that there were neither vacancies nor l interferences between the limits of state
 and national jurisdiction, and that both jurisdictions together composed
 only one uniform and comprehensive
 system of government and laws; that
 is, whenever the states can not act,
 because the need to be met IS not one
 of merely single locality, then the
 national government, representing all
 the people, should have complete pow I CT to act. It was in the spirit of Will
 son that Washington, and Washing
 tons lieutenant, Hamilton, acted; and
 it was in the same spirit that Marshall | construed the law.
 | It is only by acting in this spirit that | the national judges, legislators and
 executives can give satisfactory so-
 lution of the great question of the
 present day--the question of providing
 or behalf of the sovereign people the
 means which will enable the people in effective. form to assert their soVer- eighty over the immense corporations
 of the day. Certain judicial devil
 sions have done just what Wilson feared; they have, as matter of fact,
 left vacancies, left blanks between
 the limits of possible state Jurisdiction
 and the limits of actual national Juris-
 diction oyer the control of the great
 business corporations. It is the construction of the powers of the na- tiona government which in our de-
 mocracy have proved the chief means
 of limiting the national power to cut
 out abuses and which is now the chief bulwark of those great moneyed in- terests which oppose and dread any at tempt to place them under efficient
 governmental control.
 Many leeegislative actions and many
 judicial decisions which I am confident time will show to have been erroneous and a damage to the country would have been avoided if our legislators and jurists had approached the matter of enacting and constructing the laws of the land in the spirit of your great Pennsylvanian, Justice Wilson-in the spirit of Marshal and of Washington Such decisions put us at a great dtsad- vantage in the battle for industrial or der as against the present industrial chaos. If we interpret the Constitution in narrow instead of broad fashion, if we forsake the principles of Washing ton, Marshall, Wilson and Hamilton, We as a people will render ourselves impotent to deal with any abuses which may be committed by the men who have accumulated the enormous for tunes of to-day, and who use these for tunes in still vaster corporate form in business.
 The legislative or judicial actions and decisions of which I complain, be it re- membered, do not really leave to the states power to deal with corporateI wealth in business. Actual experience has shown that the states are whollyl to deal with this subject 1 and any action or decision that de- prives the nation of the power to deall with 1t, simply results in leaving the corporations absolutely free to work without any effective supervision whatever; and such a course is fraughtl with untold danger to the future of our whole system of government, and, indeed, to our whole civilization.
 All honest men must abhor and re- probate any effort to excite hostility to men of wealth as such. We should do all we can to encourage thrift and. bus mess energy, to put a premium upon the conduct of the man who honestly earns his livelihood and more than his livelihood, and who honestly uses the money he has earned. But it is our clear duty to see, in the interest of the