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UNEMPLOYMENT IN THE UNITED STATES 139 
know he does not really belong to that breed—always come here com- 
plaining that they can not get State action for their reforms; that it 
is hopeless, and that is why they come to Congress. 
[ wonder if they ever stop to think of the reason why they can not 
get State action? When organizations come here to Washington. for 
‘egislation the people are frequently unknown. They come from the 
ands of the country. You do not learn anything until you are told 
and then you elicit it with considerable difficulty, who they are, what 
sheir antecedents are. and vou have to puzzle out for yourselves their 
motives. 
When the people of a State go to their State capital they are not 
unknown. The legislators, or a large number of them, know all about 
them. They may know them personslly, They know why they are 
coming. They know what they have got under their chest and also, 
if it is an important measure, they take some interest in considering 
how it is going to affect their people, the people in their county or in 
their ward, when they go back home, and they make it their business 
to find out, or the newspapers make it their business to spread that 
vefore the public. The whole thing is pretty thoroughly gone into and 
exposed. If it is a good thing, it is passed. In some cases a foolish 
thing and, in many cases, a foolish measure may get through in a cer- 
tain State. But 1t does not come up in other States all at the same 
time, and in the course of a year or two it is demonstrated to anybody 
who cares to look that it is foolish, ineffective, or absurd, and conse- 
quently it is dropped and we do not hear of it again. It may be re- 
pealed or it may pass into the condition that Grover Cleveland called 
nnocuous desuetude. 
But they come here to Washington and ask you to enact for the 
first time something that they admit by their own showing they can 
aot get through their own States for the reason that State legislatures, 
with full knowledge of the people behind it and the local conditions 
confronting them and of the precise merits or demerits of the bill, have 
good reason to turn down. 
. Of course, it is easier to deal with one body than it is with 48. That 
is the very reason why we should insist upon maintaining the funda- 
mentals of the American Constitution. 
What are those fundamentals? It is very easy to speak of them, but 
[ believe that there is one thing that is definitely opposed to the funda~ 
mentals of our Constitution, and that is uniformity by compulsion. 
Uniformity in certain things as provided for by the United States 
Constitution are all right; such as a uniform bankruptcy law, a 
aniform procedure and method of naturalizing aliens, one or two 
things of that kind that by their very nature may or should be uniform 
in order to accomplish the results desired; but the fathers, the framers 
of that instrument, were far wiser than even our own distinguished 
generation in leaving a great flexibility in all other matters and pro- 
viding specifically, as far as language could make it plain, that there 
was to be no uniformity in regard to local government in this country, 
but that the local responsibility for governing yourselves was left to 
the American citizen in his own community, where he lived and where 
he knew his neighbors and was known by them. 
. That is the reason that our organization opposes this measure. It 
is a measure to compel the adoption throughout these United States 
of a single rather hastily gotten up measure. I say rather hastily,