Hughes Act, for the promotion of certain forms of industrial education; the Vocational Rehabilitation Act, for the rehabilitation of persons disabled in industry or otherwise, and their return to civil employment; the Sheppard-Towner Act for the promotion of the welfare and hygiene of Maternity and Infancy; the Act for the Study, Prevention, and Control of Venereal Diseases; the Act for the Cooperative Construction of Rural Post Roads; the Act for the Co-operative Construction of National Forest Roads and Trails; and the Act for the Co-operative Fire Protection of Forested Watersheds of Navigable Streams.

However honest and impartial may have been the motives of Congress in passing legislation of this character, it can hardly be denied that the pecuniary bait that such legislation holds out to the States is closely in the nature of bribery; that a more insidious method of tempting the States to submit to Federal encroachment than the indirect one that it provides could not well be concocted; and that, in the end, it cannot fail by the artificial stimulus that it gives to the spirit of public enterprise to involve the States in disastrous extravagance. The total amount of the Federal subsidies appropriated, pursuant to Federal aid legislation of every kind, during the fiscal year ending in 1924 amounted to no less than $110,377,443.68. Other recent Acts of Congress which have trenched upon the most sensitive functions of the States are the act creating a Children's Bureau, with the power to investigate all questions relating to infant mortality, occupations, accidents, and diseases; to birthrates, orphanages, and juvenile courts; to the desertion and employment of children, and to legislation affecting them; the act creating a Woman's Bureau, for the investigation of all matters pertaining to the welfare of women in industry; and the act creating a Department of Labor. Among still other steps, recent or more remote, by which the Federal authority has obtained its present position of aggrandizement, might be mentioned the Acts of Congress creating the Fisheries Bureau, the Bureau of Mines, the Geological Survey, the Federal Trade Commission, with its inquisitorial powers over

business concerns engaged in interstate commerce, the Tariff Commission, the Federal Reserve Board, the War Finance Corporation, the Federal Farm Loan Bureau, the Federal Power Commission, the Railroad Labor Board, with its jurisdiction over labor disputes, the United States Shipping Board, and the Emergency Fleet Corporation, with its vast mercantile marine; and the Acts of Congress relating to grain and cotton futures, packers and stockyards, the preservation of game, and the system of Western irrigation and power projects, which has come to bulk so conspicuously in Congressional appropriation bills. Later decisions of the Supreme Court under the interstatecommerce clause of the Federal constitution, such as its decision upholding the power of the Interstate Commerce Commission, under certain circumstances, to control intrastate railroad rates, have conspired to produce the same result. So have later decisions of the same court, sustaining the constitutionality of such acts as the Oleomargarine Acts, the Lottery Acts, the Pure Food and Drug Act, the White Slave Traffic Act, the Narcotic Drug Act, and the Acts regulating interstate transportation of intoxicating liquors.

After all, however, nothing since the Civil War has done so much to promote Federal consolidation as the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Amendments to the Federal Constitution: the one by imposing a sumptuary restraint upon the personal liberty of every individual in the United States without the slightest regard to the totally dissimilar manners, usages, and habits which prevail in the different States; and the other by depriving every State of the right to determine for itself whether women should or should not be permitted to exercise the suffrage.

For many years, in our national history, the South was the very citadel of State rights; yet no less than nine senators from the eleven Confederate States voted for the submission of the pending Child Labor Amendment. As for the Northwest, for some years past the attention of Congress has been vexed by fallacious schemes of government patronage proposed by that section for the relief of the farmer, which were really only regional

efforts to tax all the people of the United States for the benefit of only a part of them. Indeed, of the ninety-six members of the Senate, drawn from all the States, only a handful voted at the last session of the Sixty-eighth Congress against the provisions of the Muscle Shoals Bill which authorized the government to engage in the business of manufacturing commercial fertilizers and other industrial products at Muscle Shoals in competition with its own citizens.

The truth is that the consolidation of the Federal power has reached a point at which, when we are told that its inroads should be sternly resisted, we are reminded of the lines which Dean Swift composed in his senile decay, upon his attention being called to a newly erected building for the storage of arms and powder:

Behold! a proof of Irish sense;

Here Irish wit is seen!
When nothing's left that's worth defence,
We build a magazine.

But the field is by no means yet lost. The overwhelming defeat, to which the Child Labor Amendment is plainly doomed, is sufficient proof of that; and, moreover, there are not a few other significant tokens of a popular reaction

against extreme extensions of the Federal authority; indeed, even some of a popular disposition to recall extensions that have already been made. Especially should this reawakened interest in State rights be shared by the people of those Southern States whose social conditions are such that general control of popular education by the Federal government, and uniform Federal legislation relating to marriage and divorce, might be far more prolific of local derangement and discord within their borders than in any other part of the United States.

One thing is certain: were the Federal government to absorb all the powers of the States, bureaucratic hypertrophy, if nothing else, would render it necessary for that government to create organs of its own for local purposes; unless it were decided that the present functions of the States could be better performed by satraps or proconsuls. If this is so, surely there should be little hesitation in making a choice between subordinate agencies of administration created at Washington, and the local institutions, already created by State constitutions and laws, deeply embedded in the associations, the habits, the sentiments, and the affections of the American people.

IN the days of old the Wizard of Oz made the Kansas cyclone famous. I lived in Kansas then and thought our twisters were somewhat maligned, but I did not realize to what extent until a Texas cyclone recently blew me from there to Seattle, Washington. So many people have asked me about the storm country, and how it feels to be in a cyclone, that I thought others would be interested, too.

I lived on a ranch which comprises forty thousand acres and is ninety miles northeast of Amarillo, in that desolate region of sage-brush and sand called the Texas Panhandle. Several towns are nearer than Amarillo, though the nearest one, Pampa, which means the plain, is still thirty miles away. However, these towns are merely wide places in the road; about the size of the pin-point which dots them on the map. Fortunately for the Panhandle, Amarillo has opened up a large gas-field which has given her a place in the sun. It has also given that part of the world a location point for other than local use.

The Canadian River twists, turns, and worms its weary way through this windswept, sun-scorched region. Its bed is a half-mile wide and dry as a bone, except in the centre, where a dwindling thread of moisture has resisted the choking sands. However, in flood times the river is bank full. The ranch borders the Canadian and extends a little over the flats beyond.

The country around the river is different from the plains. It is rough and is called the brakes. Nay, not fern-brakes, with their green restfulness and shadowy shade, but sage-brush and sand-hill brakes surmounted by bleak cap rocks, gaunt sentinels in a land of dreary desolation.

Tawny hills here, white ones there, like mounds of bleaching bones with scant clumps of gray sage to hide their nakedness, stretch as far as the eye can reach. And where these hills give way to the plains the same deadly monotony of sagebrush and sand continues. Realism predominates in our literature; but the Western story is still in the hands of the romanticists. The writers still sing of the great open spaces where a man's a man without mentioning the unutterable lonesomeness of these places and the crudeness of the men therein! Realists, awake! There never will be any better places to kick in the seat of the pants the great god, Romance, than these same open spaces.

My husband, who is a Methodist in good standing, has a poker disposition notwithstanding. The only vocation which contains enough of the element of chance for him is the cattle business. For years his winnings exceeded his losses. However, during the war, when the agriculturist was urged to produce, he sold an excellent Kansas ranch, invested the proceeds in a big string of cattle, which encountered a hard winter, later a drouth, and lastly a market in chaos; and produced as per order; but produced, like the rest of the cattlemen, a terrible failure. Curtailing a long and painful tale, we ended up on this Texas ranch, farming a part of the flats on shares with the owner, whom we had known in the days of our prosperity. I cultivated or tutored the owner's children during the school months, while my husband hauled cottonseed-cake, fed cattle, and later started his crop.

During the school term we lived a community life in the main ranch-house. This is situated in a valley formed by lofty ranges of sand-hills running north and south. A little stream, which originates in springs and is bordered by giant

cottonwood-trees, flows through the valley down to the river. These trees, with the sand-hills surrounding, shelter the house from the winds-even the terrible Texas northers which vent their rage in sand-storms wherein one can scarcely see across the road.

Later, so that my husband could be nearer his work, we moved to a tenanthouse at the crest of the hills to the west. All the necessities of life were here on the flats with the exception of a storm-cave, which proved the most necessary of all. The native Texan is born with the gopherlike habit of keeping one eye on the horizon and the other on the storm-cave for six months out of the year. If no other refuge is available when a cyclone strikes, he lies down flat on the ground and lets the world whiz by!

A rude corral, a small granary, a windmill with a cement tank, and the house formed a feeble attempt at civilization in the wilderness. My nearest neighbor was the owner's wife at the main ranch-house a mile and a half to the east, the next in proximity was four miles south. Neither house was visible !

Lonesome? Yes. But wait until the evening shadows begin to fall, then the deadly silence is deeper still. There are no friendly lights from near-by houses to cheer one. No sounds of human life to greet the ears. Nothing! After the day's toil is over, one does not go out for a change of scene and rest, and no one drops in for an evening's call with the new interests attendant thereon. In the evening the mournful cries of the turtle-doves in the heavens above seem but the complaint of the human soul against life's unutterable dreariness! Books are wonderful companions, that's true. But even they pall upon a normal human being unless he can make a happy mixture of them with the society of his fellows.

Our first night had two touches that might have proved human enough to salve the lonesomeness a bit, but they came to naught. We heard the cry of a cat just at dusk. Out of the house we rushed, for we needed a family feline for an animated mouse-trap. But Tabby saw us first. As she had not seen the genus homo for many moons, she paused not for a second glance. We put out meat and

milk. But this is one cat that never came back.

About midnight I heard the sharp bark of what was apparently a dog at our doorstep. I turned to my husband, who had just awakened, and whispered: "Listen, there's the family pup!"

Then the barks gave way to the wailing hysterical yelps of the coyote, that howl which is the quintessence of lonesome desolation. I pulled the covers over my head and shuddered.

"You will never get used to the wild!” my husband chuckled.

"No, I won't. Right now the flat wheel on a street-car would sound to me like Caruso," I retorted. And it would have! The great open spaces when the lone coyote begins to howl, oh, my!

The sound died away as the coyote trailed denward. Our dog never was seen again, but he was sometimes heard.

The house faced south. It had three rooms with a south door leading into each, with north windows opposite the doors for ventilation. There were no east and west windows, no halls, no cupboards! Nothing but four cheerless walls. This is the popular style of architecture in the rural districts of the South. I furnished the west room for a bedroom, the middle for a dining-room, living-room, reception hall, kitchen, and what not, while I left the east one for a storeroom.

The structure had a peaked roof. This with a foundation of concrete above the ground made it a story and a half high. The house rocked in the northers, and when they whipped around to the south it rocked and rocked again. However, the building had withstood the storms for seven years, so why not another? Fatal logic!

I have spoken at length of the frightfully lonely conditions under which we lived because they forced me to turn to the only thing left for companionship— the sky. I became a connoisseur of sunsets. Evening after evening I watched the master painter depict the dying sun in the glorious tints that are heaven's alone. Through this sun-worship, I first noticed lowering clouds on the southwest horizon about eight-thirty of that memorable Friday evening.

At the sight of the angry clouds I

turned to the house with a shudder. The storm looked like an electrical one. And the house had an old-fashioned lightningrod system on it which was partially wrecked. Two steel points reached up for the flash of death, and perhaps would have grounded it; but a third bent over the roof menacingly. These relics of the dark ages still exist in out-of-the-way places.

The sun had fallen behind the western sand-hills by now. The clouds were mounting the sky rapidly. The centre was as black as pitch, the fringes were yellow. "Wind!" I cried out to my son, who was standing beside me playing in the windmill tank. "What terrible clouds! Why doesn't your father come? What shall we do? Let's run to the field and lie down between the furrows! It's the only thing we can do!"

"Yes, and have a centipede or a rattlesnake crawl on us!" the boy answered.

We had killed two centipedes, frightful creatures, about six inches long in the yard the day before. And at noon my husband had come in with a rattler's scalp consisting of seven rattles and a button. So the incidents were very fresh in the boy's mind. I looked up at the clouds and then down to the ground. "The centipedes and the snakes get us, I retorted, as we started toward the field with our eyes on the storm, waiting to flatten ourselves upon the ground at a moment's notice.

By this time the lightning had become terrible. It was flashing from three directions. Great vertical streams cleaved the west, alternating with rivers of fire to the south and north. I turned away from a particularly vicious flash and, facing the east, espied my husband urging his fourmule team, hampered by a saddle-horse, which was a poor trailer, over the rim of the sand-hills. He was bringing a load of milo-maize seed from the ranch-house, which must not get damp. He had not seen the clouds from the valley; the storm had come up too quickly.

I opened the corral gate, a barbed-wire one, with the lightning popping at my heels, while he drove around to the east room of the house. He unhitched the mules hurriedly from the wagon and started to the corral with them. I led the saddle-horse.

"It is a cyclone," I shouted.
"Nerves!"

my husband replied. "There is no funnel. Besides, the storm is too high in the heavens. It's nearly to the zenith!"

"But look at the color of the clouds!" "The reflection of the sun on them," he retorted.

"I'm not going into the house, anyhow," I answered.

"Want a shower-bath?" he jeered.

Now I know that my husband's motto has always been safety last. But he is so convincing when he is taking a chance, and his optimism is so contagious, that even my Scotch carefulness cannot withstand him. Then, too, at this psychological moment a terrific flash of lightning tore through the air. It must have struck something in the field near us, for the crack of the thunder was like the detonation of an immense gun. It stunned my ears momentarily! I grabbed my boy's hand and ran, ran for the only place to get into, the house!

I entered the general utility room, where I paused. Death grinned at me! I turned toward the oil-stove, in the oven of which I had placed my husband's supper. "Sit down a minute, son," I said,

while I heat this food!" I reached for a match. My good angel must have whispered to me, for I reflected: "Nerves or no nerves, this is a frightful storm. The supper can wait!" I led my boy into the bedroom. Death stalked at our heels.

Here the boy started to undress, saying: "Mother, it is getting so dark. I want to go to sleep in my own little bed!"

"Don't, son; come lie on the foot of my bed with me; I am so frightened!" I replied, as I turned to light a lamp which stood on a table near me.

As we flung ourselves on the bed I realized that there was not a sound anywhere. A horrible vacuum of quiet! I sat upright in terror. Then I heard a roar. But my husband's attitude had been so sure that I cried out in relief: "Oh, the blessed, blessed rain has come ! The worst is over!"

But the roar was not rain. It was wind. The house gave a frightful lurch. Then I heard a terrible crunching sound like giant footsteps. The house was bumping over the ground. I realized now that my