THE 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 ”—1. e., 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 querulouuly, “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 (“The 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- 
