more than any one else brought about a successful and glorious issue to that conflict, was not the man who fought at Manila Bay, or Santiago, but William McKinley, the lawyer. (Applause.)

NATIONAL INCORPORATION AND CONTROL

OF CORPORATIONS.

The Constitution of the United States provides that

The Congress shall have power * * * to regulate commerce * * among the several States."

The decisions of the Supreme Court are to the effect that the Federal Government should be confined very strictly to the subjects as to which it has been given jurisdiction by the Constitution, but when once it has jurisdiction of the subject its powers shall be broadly and liberally construed. The fields it may enter are narrowly defined, but when once within the field its power is limited only by the express prohibitions of the Constitution itself.

In construing the particular provisions of the Constitution I have quoted, the Supreme Court, so far as it has passed on the question, follows its well-known rule. It will not sustain legislation that relates only to production simply because the articles produced may afterwards become the subject of interstate commerce, but it sets no limit to the regulations which may be imposed on the commerce itself, even though these regulations may affect or even control production.

The makers of the Constitution were wise and farseeing men. The President of the Constitutional Convention was a man who never said a superfluous word and never failed to do the right thing at the right time. Wash

ington's influence in that Convention was all the greater because he was slow to exert it and all the better because he always thought before he spoke. The reason why the Convention - whatever foolish things may have been said did not one foolish thing from its call to order to its adjournment, was perhaps because the man at the head of it and who guided its counsels never himself either said or did a foolish thing.

The Convention was composed of men of the youngest but the most self-reliant nation in the world.

We of the English-speaking race have always been the most self-reliant of men because we and our ancestors, from the time we were the wild denizens of the German forest, down to the anthracite coal strike, have had to shape our destinies for ourselves. The Latin has always had someone king or emperor, Pope or priest to do his thinking for him. The Saxon has had to do it for himself, and his fate on earth and in heaven has depended on his own exertions. He has had no confessor on whom he could shift the burden and responsibility for his sin or his salvation. He has had to suffer for the one and work out the other for himself. It was the descendants of the men who wrested from the unwilling hands of King John that Magna Charta which was the forerunner of our Constitution the descendants of the men who for six centuries. in the English Parliament and out of it, with a determination that never faltered, defended the right of the representatives of the people to lay the taxes the people were to pay the descendants of the men who fought at Marston Moor and Naseby that cut off the head of one king and drove another into exile, that elected the members of the Constitutional Convention of 1787.

The people who elected that Constitutional Convention were the most self-reliant of their self-reliant race. By a

process of natural selection the bravest and the best of a race that itself was the bravest and the best had left their homes in the old world and endured climatic rigors, frontier hardships and the onslaughts of savage foes to found a community where they could be more free and more the architects and the artisans of their own fortunes than they could be at home.

The men who fought the battles of freedom in America were better even than those they had left behind them, who themselves were otherwise the best of men.

Well said the pious Stoughton of Massachusetts:

"God sifted a whole nation that he might send choice grain over into this wilderness."

The Convention itself was composed of the leading lawyers, statesmen, publicists and patriots of the Nationmen who were not deficient in the knowledge to be derived from books, but who knew more than books could teach; who were not deficient in eloquence, but were men of deeds rather than words, and above all, of men who, in one way or another, had done their share to create the Nation they were now seeking to place on a broader and securer foundation.

No wonder that the Constitution which was the result of the work of the Convention so elected, so constituted and so presided over should have stood the test of time.

It was devised for a nation extending only from Maine. to Georgia and from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, with a population of only four million people, who were without wealth and mostly engaged in agricultural pursuits. It has been found necessary to amend it only six times in more than a hundred years three times within the first few years after its adoption to perfect the original instrument in some minor details and three times after the Civil

War to provide for new conditions which were the result of that war and it is now the basis of the government of a nation that extends from Porto Rico to the Orient, and from the Yukon to Samoa, on whose dominions the sun never sets, with a population of eighty millions of people engaged in every kind of production, trade and the greatest, freest, strongest and richest

commerce

Nation in the world.

It is this Constitution that provides that " The Congress shall have power to regulate commerce among the several States."

The men who inserted that clause in the Constitution meant something by it. There are no superfluous words in the instrument any more than there were in the cominon speech of the Great Commander who presided over the Convention.

There was very little interstate commerce in the United' States at that time. A few sailing vessels brought products to the ports of Boston, Providence, Newport, New London, New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore, but they were mostly tropical products, coming from outside the United States. It was half a century before we discovered that we could produce such things cheaper than we could buy them, and before interstate commerce on any large scale began to take the place of commerce with foreign nations. A few farmers living near State lines engaged in interstate commerce in the products of the dairy, the potato field and the hen-house, and the wives of Delaware and New Jersey bought some of their finery in Philadelphia and New York retail shops. It was not, however, hen-house products or the finery of retail stores that the Constitution-makers had in mind. No man ever saw further into the future than George Washington, and the Convention over which he presided shared his faith in the

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United States that was to be. It was a quarter of a century before George Stephenson built his first locomotive, so they could not foresee the system of iron roads that now binds the Nation together more closely than a hun dred constitutions could, but God had made the rivers. and the lakes, and it was Washington himself who planned the first artificial waterway to supplement them. The members of that Convention foresaw perhaps not in all its greatness, but in a greatness approaching the reality the mighty commerce among the several States" that was to come, and they well knew what they were doing when they provided that Congress should regulate that commerce. So great was to be its influence in the development of the nation, the cornerstone of whose government they were laying, so important to the welfare and prosperity and happiness of the people, that it was not to be left to the caprice or selfish interests of any particular State. Interstate commerce, as it developed, was to be a matter of national concern, under the control and regulation of the National Congress.

The great problem of the Constitutional Convention was the division of the power of government between the Nation and the constituent States. The Convention solved the problem and made no mistake. Not one of the fifteen amendments relate to this question, and the Constitution to-day, so far as this division is concerned, is precisely as it originally stood. No different arrangement has been found necessary; no change of line fences has been found desirable. The general government has been found to have all the powers that it needs and none that are dangerous. We had, it is true, four years of Civil War to determine the question of whether a State might secede from the Nation, but the Nation won, and the only changes that were made in the Constitution itself at the close of