Rensselaer Republican, Volume 16, Number 32, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 April 1884 — State Sovereignty Rkn Mad. [ARTICLE]

State Sovereignty Rkn Mad.

One of the signs of orthodox Democracy that might have been referred to by the experts who were recently called upon in lowa to give the tests of real Democracy is the doctrine of State .sovereignty . This is, to _be a as Calhoun and his nullifying crowd found out to their heart’s content from the herb of New Orleans, but it has in these degenerate days become one of the fetich* s of that party. When the terrible’Visitation of veliow fevef fell upon the South a few years ago the people of the North, animated by the paternal desire to use all the means in their power for the suppression of the pestilence, unanimously sustained the intervention of the General Government with the expenditure of money, the issue of rations, the distribution of shelter-tente, the assignment of army physicians to assist in the care of the sick, in short the fullest exercise of the resources of the central power. But even in that dread emergency, with yellow fever swooping down upon scores of communities, the devotees of this fetich of State sovereignty could not run so fast from the Angel of Death but that they had time to give a kick io the hand that brought them aid. The Bepresentatives of Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, and Mississippi yelped, snarled, and snapped at the ( hand that was bringing them the best* it could command of relief and protection. They took all that was offered, but graciously J eminded the giver that his benevolence proceeded on an entirely incorrect theory of the true functions of Federal Government, Precisely the same blind devotion to the nullifying theory that stood ready to take out of Calhoun by the application of a hemp poultice animates the opposition of the Bourbon Senators to the appropriation for the extermination of the cattle-plague, which, whether it be genuine foot-and-mouth disease or not, is contagious and extremely dangerous to the welfare of the people of the whole country. While the germs of disease are spreading from one State to another, threatening to infect all the herds on the ranges in the Territories on their dispersal in the

spring, receiving re-enforcement at the ports on the seacoast where European cattle are being imported, portending the loss if unchecked of millions alike to the owners of cattle and the consumers of meat, all that the Statesovereignty ghosts in the Senate qan find to say is, that the interventibnjof the only adequate power —that .of the natio > would be inconsistent* with their theory of the Constitution. Senator Bayard, who does not find anything out of the way in the use of the sovereign powers of taxation of the Federal Government fo*r the enrichment of the Wilmington Match Company, can only shriek State rights when it is proposed to use those same powers of taxation to protect the food of a nation. We cannot see the sense or the consistency of this theory of Federal powers. The State rights that Senator Bayard, and Senator Pendleton, and Senator Morgan, and Senator Harris are fighting for is the right of States to poison their neighbors’ food and to infect their cattle with a deathdealing disease. If it is not competent for the Federal Government to use its common powers to prevent, such a common calamity then governments are a mockery and have no real: ocial raison d’etre. It would seem as if the late unpleasantness was too short. , It ought to have lasted one campaign longer. The war proved nothing if it did not demonstrate that the Government of this country was a real National Government that could do anything that was demanded by the general welfare. It is not an aggregation of little political patches in each of which there is a minute central postule of sovereignty. There is but one center of sovereignty in this Union, and that is at Washing ton, and its sovereignty is ample for all the needs of the people. There was enough gunpowder consumed during the war to have burned this truth unto any ordinary cuticle.— Chicago Tribune.