Mr. Roosevelt and States Rights The fact that the important
.Democratic paper, the Post Dispatch of St. Louis, has joined the equally Demo- cratic Baltimore Sun in withdrawing support from Mr. Roosevelt is significant. The reason given is that on the issue of " whether or not we will set up in America, in defiance of American tradition and in defiance of the plain intent of the Constitution as it now stands, a Government with vast and centralised authority over the economic life of the national," the paper is bound to give a negative answer. Thus the old Jeffersonian doctrine of States Rights asserts itself, and fresh point is given (as it was given in President Wilson's time) to the paradox of a Democratic President being compelled to go further than any Republican in subordinating the States to the Federal Government. Mr. Roosevelt's answer is plain : he could no other. In Lincoln's time the nation could not remain half slav-e.and half free. In Roosevelt's time it cannot remain half centralised and half disintegrated. It is significant that neither of the dissident papers advises its readers to vote against the President, and the whole. episode tends to emphasise the difficulties arising from the attempt to fit the America. of 1936 into the strait-waistcoat of the Constitution of 1788. It is not good for a country to be governed by its Supreme Court.
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