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sneered at its members. The congresses of those years must remainas monuments of weakness and docility. Worse, they supply to usthe complete proof that when the power of the purse is surrenderedto the President, the Congress becomes a mere rubber stamp. Thisis the plan which the remodelers of our government propose tofasten on the nation as its permanent form.4. THE BUREAUCRATIC STATECongress is being incessantly badgered because of its failure todeal to the satisfaction of everyone with all the innumerable problemsthat demand its attention. The explanation of this takes us tothe very center of the great problem of national government, whichcannot longer be ignored. For a good many years the people in localcommunities and in states have been calling upon government toassume first one and then another function hitherto belonging toprivate arrangement. The problems of farmers, of little and bigbusinessmen, of human welfare, of education, of all sorts of thingshave been saddled on the government. Along with these has goneanother movement to push all those problems toward Washington.Under the interstate-commerce clause of the Constitution almosteverything under the sun, including taking a girl on a party acrossa state line, has been held to be interstate commerce. The mostfantastic manipulations of that phrase—interstate commerce—havebeen invoked to bring the matter under the jurisdiction of thefederal government.The effect of this has been to pile upon the desk of Congress amountainous heap of problems with which no human beings evercreated can possibly deal. The only escape from this impossible assumptionof tasks has been to pass them on to some subordinateagency. Congress, therefore, began to create bureaus. And as fastas new functions were thrust upon Congress it expanded thebureaus already created and then created new ones. This practicebegan before the last war. The war gave the movement a greatimpetus. The problems of the postwar world added to the tendency.The Great Depression of 1929 gave an immense push to the wholemovement. This war has finally completed the job until today,240