women utter prayers of devotion and sing hymns of adoration to the Power whence comes all their anguish is to him a veritable abdication of reason and common sense. God simply does not deserve it, and he for one will have the courage to say so. He will not stand by and see humanity submit so tamely to so heartless a tyrant. For, although Mr. Hardy is a pessimist, he has not the least tincture of cynicism. If one analyzes his novels carefully one will see that he seldom shows scorn for his characters; his contempt is exclusively devoted to God. Sometimes the evil fate that his characters suffer is caused by the very composition of their mind, as is seen in "A Pair of Blue Eyes"; again it is no positive human agency, but rather an Eschylean conception of hidden forces, as in "The Return of the Native"; but in neither case is humanity to blame.

This pessimism has one curious effect that adds greatly to the reader's interest when he takes up an hitherto unread novel by our author. The majority of works of fiction end happily; indeed, many are so badly written that any ending cannot be considered unfortunate. But with most novelists we have a sense of security. We know that, no matter what difficulties the hero and heroine may encounter, the unseen hand of their maker will guide them eventually to paths of pleasantness and peace. Mr. Hardy inspires no such confidence.

However dark may be his conception of life, Mr. Hardy's sense of humor is unexcelled by his contemporaries in its subtlety of feeling and charm of expression. His rustics, who have long received and deserved the epithet "Shakespearian," arouse in every reader harmless and wholesome delight. The shadow of the tragedy lifts in these wonderful pages, for Mr. Hardy's laughter reminds one of what Carlyle said of Shakespeare's: it is like sunshine on the deep sea. The childlike sincerity of these shepherd farmers, the candor of their repartee and their appraisal of gentle folk are as irresistible as their patience and equable temper. Every one in the community seems to find his proper mental and moral level. And their infrequent fits of irritation are as pleasant as their more solemn moods. We can all sympathize (I hope) with the despair of Joseph Poorgrass: "I was sitting at home looking for Ephesians and says I to myself, "Tis nothing but Corinthians and Thessalonians in this danged Testament!" WILLIAM LYON PHELPS.

STATES WITH IDEAS OF THEIR OWN.

BY PHILIP LORING ALLEN.

THOSE who advocate increased centralization of power and function in the Federal Government necessarily have but scant respect for the differences of policies among the several States. These differences have been striking, always vexatious and often ridiculous. In many departments business would manifestly be facilitated and rights safeguarded if such differences did not exist. The centralizationist attributes most of them to ignorance, to prejudices, as to improper motives. In his mind, they could all be swept away with no loss that could for a moment be set against the gain. His projects actually pending are, no doubt, scrupulously confined to those fields in which the constitutional power of the Federal Government is unquestioned. Sometimes it is argued, as in the case of certain of the powers exercised under the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution, that a new extension of Federal authority is really for the benefit of the States themselves, protecting the good States against the machinations of the bad States. Sometimes it is argued that certain important things will not be done at all unless the Federal Government does them. But it is obvious that if the process of extension continues, whether by constitutional amendment or by interpretation, Federal functions must in time impinge directly upon State functions. Uniformity is one of the great objects of centralization and uniformity can thus be obtained only by supplanting conflicting State laws by a single Federal statute. is, therefore, fair to consider State policies and systems and their claims to be continued in force, irrespective of whether in any particular instance there is any definite project of National control.

Dr. Crothers, in one of his whimsical essays, has suggested a contrast between the British House of Lords which

"... throughout the War Did nothing in particular

And did it very well,"

and a Western Legislature which did a large number of extremely important things and did them all very badly. The warmest supporter of States' rights is often forced to adopt an apologetic tone when talking of State legislation in the mass. If the national Congress is sometimes visionary, inept and erratic, the State Legislatures are the scenes of constant exhibitions of these qualities. Crazy notions appear and disappear. Constituencies are treated to ebullitions of humor in respect to matters where humor is out of place. "Freak bills" are regular features of the legislative calendars. A bill in New Jersey recently proposed a license tax on whiskers, one in Nebraska a ten-per-cent. income tax on bachelors, one in Minnesota made it a crime for a farmer not to practise rotation of crops, one in Iowa required all eggs to be stamped with the date when they were laid, one in Missouri prohibited "treating" in such sweeping terms that the purchase of ice-cream for a young girl by her beau would have been illegal under its provisions. Of course such fantastic bills usually fail, but a surprising number of them have got on the statute-books in the past. Kentucky, for instance, has made it a felony to trespass on a ginseng garden. Georgia, doubtless in memory of many bucolic swindles, imposes a tax of twenty-five dollars in each county on peddlers of patent churns and patent fences. The forty-five States exhibit as many crotchets as so many headstrong, opinionated individuals.

How these come into being is illustrated by the many different ways in which an entirely new subject for legislative action can be regarded. The popularity of the automobile brought such a subject before the State and local lawmaking bodies generally some ten years ago. Thirty-six States have passed automobile laws since then. Not only are no two of these statutes exactly alike, but no one of them copies the essential feature of the law of the country from which most of our successful horseless vehicles were at first imported. The idea of the French law was, and is, to impose no specific restriction on speed or power, but to hold the driver and owner to the strictest ac

countability for all damage. All the American States, however, have put their trust in speed limits. These speed limits themselves are not uniform. A driver may be arrested in New Jersey for running at a speed of thirty miles an hour; in Alabama more than eight miles an hour. For the rest some States license both car and chauffeur, some only the car, while at least one has legislated on the subject without licensing either. Some States permit the passage of local regulations, some prohibit these. Some admit no cars owned by non-residents to be operated in the State until they have been registered there. Some are hospitable indefinitely to cars which have been properly registered in another State. Delaware extends this courtesy for only forty-eight hours, after which the non-resident motorist must register his car or leave the State. A motor bicycle is an automobile in Indiana, while a traction engine is not; both are automobiles in New Jersey, neither in New York—a state of affairs which recalls the railway conductor's famous decision that, "Cats is dogs and rabbits is dogs, but turtles is insecks."

Ideas in automobile regulation have been copied to some extent. For example: Minnesota having required all gasoline machines to use mufflers" within the limits of cities and villages, Vermont inserted a corresponding provision in a general law passed the next year, and Oregon and Washington did the same the year after. There is one facetious clause, that of Kansas confirming "the prerogative of any political chauffeur to run an automobilous band-wagon at any rate he sees fit compatible with the safety of the occupants thereof . . . provided that whenever a mangled and bleeding political corpse implores for mercy the driver of the vehicle shall, in accordance with the provisions of this bill, throw out the life-line."" Yet the laws, on the whole, are characterized by a spirit of evident fairness. "Seldom," says the Law Committee of the Automobile Club of America, "do we find evidence of hostility carried to excess in any of the legislative enactments."

Below all such unnecessary or meaningless inconsistencies there remains a stratum of individual State policies which are not the result of mere caprice nor lack of information nor unbalanced reasoning, but of genuine conviction. The States differ constantly upon questions which have been for generations the staples of debating societies. A simple instance is the question of capital

punishment. Every schoolboy and presumably every legislator is familiar with the arguments pro and con. Yet the States continue to be divided. As to liquor laws, there has never been any sort of uniformity. The highest tide of prohibition sentiment has never reached great areas of license territory, while even the extreme of reaction left three commonwealths under State-wide prohibition.

Nor are such diversities of opinion less manifest in those departments of legislation which are rather the concern of experts. There is, for example, the question of corporation laws. It is not disputed that certain of the States have entered into a discreditable competition for corporation business, making their laws intentionally lax for this purpose. But even the States which are fully exonerated from any such charge are not at one in method. This is illustrated by two recent comparative studies of the State incorporation laws. The Massachusetts law of 1903 is one of the most celebrated of these statutes. "A conspicuous point of the Massachusetts law," wrote Edward Dana Durand, in the "Yale Review" for February, 1904, "is the absence of any requirement that property or services for which stock is issued shall actually, or at least in the honest judgment of the directors, be worth the par value of the stock given for them. This is almost universally prescribed in the laws of the other States." On the other hand, Don E. Mowry, writing in the "Central Law Journal," pointed another contrast. Massachusetts, he said, was one of the few States in which five men cannot sit around a table, put one dollar in the centre, organize a corporation calling for a million dollars' worth of capital, repocket the dollar, and go home after sending a certificate of incorporation to the Secretary of State with a million-dollar enterprise ready to launch."

In other words, the State which imposed the closest restrictions in one particular was least strict in another. Massachusetts proceeded on a theory of her own as to the special points on which the stockholders and the public needed to be safeguarded.

Another example of divergent State policies is afforded by the various railway commissions. Some of these have always possessed the rate-making power, some never. The "advisory commissions have existed beside the "regulative" commissions practically ever since the idea of State control was first applied,