THE FUNCTIONS OF GOVERNMENT 285 
of the natural resources the people are but protecting their own. The 
growth of the sense of common welfare has been greatly impeded by 
court decisions based on common-law doctrines which the constitution 
was designed to displace, decisions sometimes tincturing later legisla- 
tion; yet several courts have fairly kept pace with the growing sense of 
eternal equities among the people—they who adopted the constitution 
partly to provide a judicative mechanism adapted to their own needs 
and subject to their own supreme will: The decision of the supreme 
court of Maine that the public are entitled to a voice in the management 
of forests affecting stream-flow; the finding of the New Jersey court 
of errors and appeals, sustained by the supreme court of the United 
States, that the people have a residuary right in the waters; the opinion 
of the supreme court in the Rio Grande case that the government may 
maintain navigability by protecting the source waters—these and other 
decisions tending toward closer unity of interest among all the people 
are signs of the times. So, too, are the enactments by the congress for 
reclaiming lands and constructing canals under the “ general welfare ” 
clause of the constitution, and providing for the Panama Canal and for 
operations in the insular possessions under the same constitutional 
warrant—enactments viewed askance by ultra-strict constructionists, 
yet amply sustained by that court of final appeal, the judgment of the 
people expressed through their franchise and sustained by their own 
paramount power. 
v 
The waterway and conservation movements are still young, and may 
reasonably be expected to contribute continuously to that public welfare 
by which they were inspired. Whatever they may do in the future, they 
have already done much. They have revealed to the people a growing 
sense of their own powers and rights and duties as citizens. They have 
brought to light and started toward rectification our ineffective if not 
actually repressive methods of administration by legislative machinery. 
They have shown the inherent rights of the people in and to those 
material resources given value by their own work, and on which their 
own prosperity and perpetuity depend; and thereby they have warmed 
the spirit of unity among citizens and states. They have stirred patriot- 
ism more than any peaceful issue before, deeply as only bloody wars 
have done in the past. Incidentally, they are surely establishing the 
elective function as the primary power of representative government, 
and will no less surely establish the administrative function as correla- 
tive with those of legislative and judicative character. 
