repealed the law of Maryland and was not in confiict with the treaty, but in entire accordance with the treaty:* while his opinion was based largely on the effect of the laws of Maryland, which had been adopted by Congress in 1801 as the laws of the District of Columbia applying to realty, but which had been changed by the Act of Congress of 1887, passed a year before Riggs died. Congress had a right to pass such an Act, and that Act specifically gave the right to aliens to acquire property by inheritance. If so, the laws of Maryland adopted by Congress for the District of Columbia in 1801, which denied the right of inheritance to aliens, were repealed by the Act of 1887, which in direct language gave the right of inheritance to them. Judge Field refers to the Act of 1887 in the latter part of his opinion. How can it be said that this case decided a conflict between a Treaty and the State law of Maryland when Congress by the Act of 1887 supplanted the law of Maryland and enacted its own law giving aliens the right of inheritance in the District of Columbia? If my conclusions about these cases be not correct, this anomaly is presented that the Supreme Court from Ware v. Hylton to Geofroy v. Riggs has decided uniformly that a treaty annulled State laws in conflict with it and yet has recently decided the cases of Compagnie Francaise v. The Board of Health, Rocca v. Thompson, Patsone v. Pennsylvania, and Heim v. McCall, sustaining the laws of States which conflicted with existing treaties between the United States and foreign countries. To adopt such a conclusion is to hold that the Supreme Court has reversed its position on this question. This I do not believe, but more rationally these later decisions serve to interpret the earlier ones, making the action of the Court throughout its history consistent and uniform. My brethren of the Bar of Georgia, I have wearied you with the details of this dry subject because I have an intense interest in the subject. I am a great believer in our constitutional form of government, and as strongly as I believe any fact in life, do I believe its preservation is necessary for the *See Ward v. Race Horse, 163 U. S. 514. security and liberty of the people of this country (Applause); and, when I see attacks upon it, some open, some hidden, I feel that it is time for men, such as you and I, to join our hands and hearts together to repel these invasions of our sacred rights. (Applause.) I have lived long enough to see the effect of these things; nay, more, my brethren, we are in war to-day with Germany because Germany has asserted that the military is superior to the civil power, when for three hundred years since the landing of our fathers at Jamestown, we have developed and upheld the glorious doctrine that, however much we may glory in our military achievements, the military must bow to the civil power; and when you remember that this government under which we are living, has its root in the ancient Saxon commonwealth back in the forests of Germany, and that from the forests of Germany these Saxon principles of freedom were brought to us, what, I ask, has brought about the antagonism between us? It is because Germany has departed from the principles of the Saxon commonwealth, wherein local rights were left to the people in their townships, counties, cities, and States, and has transferred them to one centralized government; and when we see to-day evidences that those powers, which under the Saxon commonwealth and under our government were originally confided to the people in their States, are being quietly centered in a centralized government at Washington, it must give us pause, for when Germany departed from the Saxon ideals, and by degrees took away the powers of the people, it was found necessary to enlarge the army to protect the government that had usurped their powers; and by just so much as power is taken from the people, and lodged in a central government, by just that much will the army of a country be increased to keep down the people whose rights have been taken. That is the ground of our fight with Germany as I see it to-day! What does Jefferson say? "It is not by the consolidation or concentration of powers, but by their distribution, that good government is effected. Were not this country already divided into States that division must be made that each might do for itself what concerns itself directly, and what it can so much better do than a distant authority. Every State is again divided into counties, each to take care of what lies within its local bounds; each county again into townships or wards, to manage minuter details; and every ward into farms, to be governed each by its individual proprietor. Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap we should soon want bread. It is by this partition of cares, descending in gradation from general to particular, that the mass of human affairs may be best managed for the good and prosperity of all." The New York Times, in an editorial of April 4, 1916, upon the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of peace, said: "Not through generous emotions and magnanimity, but from considerations that profoundly concern our future social and political welfare, we may now feel and say that some of the living ideas for which the people of the South took up arms are worthy of our present attention. The fiftieth anniversary of peace is a fitting time to recall them to the minds of men. Just as the vital principles of English liberty found their support and continuance not at the hands of the government of George III, but in the revolt of the American colonies, so we may feel that doctrines held dear by the statesmen of the South-doctrines which suffered a great decline, but not death, since they are and should be imperishable-through the loss of the cause of which they were a part, might now, to our manifest and great advantage, be revivified and restored to their place in our political creed."* My brethren of the bar, I think in my own State, and all through this Southern country, there are men who are turning their backs upon the principles for which the old veterans stood (who are to-day assembling in the city of Washington), and are willing to surrender those principles, as was said by Senator Works on the floor of the United States Senate, that they may get their arms up to their elbows in the public crib. At a time like this when the most insidious and dangerous assaults are being made upon the citadel of our liberties, when *See also the address of Elihu Root as President of the American Bar Association at Chicago, 1916. a leading paper in the great metropolis of this country bemoans the attempted destruction of doctrines which are dear to our hearts, when statesmen like Root and Hughes, Taft and Baldwin, Parker and Olney, deplore the tendency to destroy constitutional limitations, it behooves us to put on our armor, never to be put aside, and fight for these principles until we shall witness the complete triumph of the constitution of our country in its full integrity in the development of national progress and the preservation of liberty to the individual in every department of life. THE POWERS OF CONGRESS UNDER THE COMMERCE CLAUSE. PAPER BY OF MACON. If those who framed the Constitution of the United States did not intend that, in the course of time, the Federal Government should, with almost autocratic power, control the affairs of all the people of this nation, more care should have been taken to place some limitation upon the powers of Congress with reference to the administration of our finances and the regulation of our commerce. It is safe to assert that the governmental power which can control the finances and the commerce of the nation, with the incidental power of police regulation to help along, can and will announce laws which are not only paramount in certain fields but are all pervading and all embracing as to sphere of operation. I have thought that it might be of interest to the members of the association to have a cursory review of the congressional enactments made in recent years under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution and of some of the highest court's decisions upon the constitutionality of these laws. First, let us advert to the appearance and growth of a police power in the Federal Government. Just what police power is we do not know. The subject of electricity cannot afford more possibilities, vagaries, and mysteries. Certain it is that it is a very present help in time of legislative or judicial trouble. Viewing the constant impressment of police power into service for the purpose of sustaining legislation in the face of apparently reasonable attack, we may well say, in para |