The answers that wise and good people have made to them should have weight in any decision we may make as to the right and effective divisions of law and its enforcement in our American system.
This problem of division of authority has within it a puzzling counter-interpretation of our original Constitution and of our history up to date.

The doctrine of "States Rights," it is said, received its death blow in the Civil War, but the equal political and civil rights of the negro, which that war was supposed to establish as a national concern, vary with the varying attitudes of people of the different states toward the enforcement of the Constitutional Amendments which were intended to secure those rights.

The Southern States, it is said, still stand for the dignity and autonomy of each Commonwealth in matters of restriction upon labor and of provision for tax-supported education, but the inner stronghold of the Federal Prohibition Amendment is the section of the country south of Mason and Dixon's line.

The new States, again it is said, are more tenacious of national centralization of government because more evidently drawing their powers from the federal centre, but in the valley of the Mississippi from north to south,--that section which promises to have the determination of the course of American history in its hands for the next hundred years,--there are signs that the state autonomy and the state jealousy of invasion of local authority in the interest of national conformity to federal law are not by any means unknown.
There should be some more carefully outlined and more commonly understood principles of judgment to lead us to decisions, when a thing we believe it good to do or a law we desire to set in place and in operation call upon us for support, as to the best way of using that support.

Whether to try for a federal amendment or a national statute, whether to work wholly within each State, or whether it is matter which so depends upon local sentiment and local cooeperation that each smallest community centre must work out its own salvation, or secure its own advance in independent work,--this is the problem.
=Comparison Between National and Local Effort.=--One reason why some elements of social progress lag behind others which are not more firmly believed in is that confusion of effort has followed the contrary forms of attack upon the national, the state, or the local governments for the furtherance of the object in which all parties believe.