TEE FUNCTIONS OF GOVERNMENT 283 



not caused — the decline and disappearance of navigation from the 

 finest river system of the world in a country suffering from the lack of 

 transportation facilities. Already a majority of the states are moving, 

 and many citizens in every state are astir ; and the prevailing sentiment 

 runs along the lines forecast century-before-last by Gouverneur Morris 

 and George Washington. 



IV 



When popular assemblies " demand and direct " action relating to 

 waterways, regardless of party and under a suffrage penalty, the 

 awakening means more than mere recognition of bad legislative and 

 administrative methods; it extends to that innate and primary power 

 seized on by the founders as a substitute for the " divine right of 

 kings " — i. e.j the power of the people defined in the preamble of the 

 constitution and exercised through the suffrage. While this power has 

 existed throughout our history, the act of suffrage is the last to be 

 realized as essentially governmental — indeed as the supreme function 

 of democratic government. The spirit of free citizenship arises slowly ; 

 to the anthropologist it is the latest self-conscious attribute acquired 

 by mankind in that long course of human progress stretching from the 

 prime to the present. Even in our Atlantic tidewater states, the real 

 home of democracy, few citizens feel the franchise as in and of itself 

 a function of government; in oratorical flights they hear and even 

 declare that ours is a government of the people by the people for the 

 people, yet only the exceptional citizen actually senses the casting of 

 his ballot as a function no less governmental in character than those 

 delegated thereby to his fellow-citizens acting as president and repre- 

 sentative and judge. Now this is the sense stirred by the non-partisan 

 waterway and other conventions, particularly in the newer states west 

 of the Appalachians; it is the sense stirred as well in DesMoines and 

 other municipalities governed by the commission system carrying pro- 

 vision for initiative and referendum and recall — the sense of innate 

 power exercised through the elective function. 



Concurrently with the sense of power the realization of rights is 

 arising; and naturally enough, first as to the waters. Finding nation 

 and most states apathetic, the more progressive waterway advocates 

 looked into fundamental questions for themselves ; and now, as a member 

 of the supreme bench recently declared half querulously, " The country 

 is full of constitutional lawyers." Five years ago, few citizens cared to 

 consider the ownership of water in itself ; to-day tens of thousands are 

 familiar with the tenth amendment (" Tbe powers not delegated to the 

 United States by the constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are 

 reserved to the States respectively or to the people"), and hold that 

 since this resource was never granted to the nation or conveyed to the 

 states it necessarily belongs to the people as a heritage no less inde- 



