Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/291

Rh 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 legislation; 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.

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 patriotism 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 correlative with those of legislative and judicative character.