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or towns. Hospitals, playgrounds, roads, eleemosynary activities ofall sorts fall within the purview of state and local power. In timesof emergency some latitude will be tolerated for the federal government,but even this is greatly limited and is temporary. If the federalgovernment builds schools it must be done through the state authorities,and the same thing applies to almost every other public enterprise.One important consequence of this is that these schools, roads,hospitals, playgrounds, health and recreational activities when completedare in the hands of the local governments and must bemaintained by them.The capacity of the states and cities to support these extravagantpublic enterprises is limited. Most states and a very large number ofcities plunged gaily into debt in the lush days of the twenties andnow find themselves saddled with an intolerable burden of debtcharges. To this is added the maintenance of those numerous institutionsand facilities built for them with federal funds. The states andcities are pretty generally at the end of their rope. The war, with itsflood of federal expenditures pouring into the states, on a strictlyfederal project—war—has, for the moment, rescued the states andcities from the unequal struggle against debt charges and city costson one side and the dwindling state and city tax resources on theother. But this will not last. When the war ends, states and cities willresume their battle to carry on the activities to which they are nowcommitted. The building of any more institutions or roads or parksor playgrounds, hospitals and various educational and welfare utilitieswill impose upon them a burden they cannot support. This pointhad been reached in 1939. At that time the federal government wasstudying, preparing, and urging on cities a..id states projects of allsorts, and the states were in a growing number of cases refusingthem because they were already pressed to the wall to operate existingfacilities. The cities and states wanted federal money but theywanted it without having it flow into new and expanded local andstate institutions the support of which would devolve upon theseauthorities.As part of the whole theory of spending in a political system suchas ours the federal system becomes an almost insuperable barrier.Either the spending program will bog down for lack of projects orzo6