Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/289

Rh 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.

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., 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 representative 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 Des-Moines and other municipalities governed by the commission system carrying provision 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 ("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