At a great crisis in the history of the American Commonwealth, Abraham Lincoln in a speech delivered in June, 1858, used these words: “If we could first know where we are and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do and how to do it.” The British Commonwealth has reached a crisis in its affairs, but the nature of the crisis escapes the diagnosis of most students and many are inclined, therefore, to echo the words which Lincoln used nearly a hundred years ago. It seems worth while, accordingly, to set down as simply as possible some of the changes that have occurred in the structure and composition of the Commonwealth in recent years, in the hope that, on this basis, some judgment may be hazarded about “where we are and whither we are tending.”

When the War ended in 1945 the British Commonwealth could still be described in the terms adopted almost twenty years before, at the Imperial Conference of 1926, as a group of “autonomous communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations.”

The prosecution of the cold war on the domestic front was a major concern of the state legislatures which convened in 1949. Quantitatively, last year's output of state laws against subversive movements surpassed that of any other year in our history except 1919. It was a rare hopper which did not receive at least a sprinkling of bills of this sort. And the fact that no more than fifteen states enacted anti-Communist laws can be attributed in large part to the inability of lawmakers to think of restrictive measures which an earlier legislature had not already placed on the statute books.

As 1950 began, Maine alone among the states was without a law designed specifically to repress or combat subversive organizations or individuals. Thirty-eight states at that date had criminal statutes prohibiting acts of violence and utterances urging violence for the purpose of effecting political or economic change. Although Tennessee's Sedition Act goes back to 1715 and two other states enacted similar statutes in the nineteenth century, these laws are for the most part products of the present century.

The central problem in national executive organization for water resources is that of fitting the service of specialized Federal agencies to the task of promoting the unified development of entire drainage basins. While technical recognition of the interlocking character of water resources development grew rapidly after 1920 and found expression in basin-wide plans, the administrative organization was unable to keep pace. It now presents conspicuous weaknesses which have been described by the Hoover Commission and its Task Force on Natural Resources. Remedial action involving the combination of several existing agencies and the creation of a central board of review have been recommended. An effort also has been initiated to correlate and reconcile the disperse and often conflicting Federal policies upon which the agencies are operating.

In examining the Valley Authority as an administrative device for Federal water resource management this paper will assume that its essential characteristics are those exemplified by the Tennessee Valley Authority, with such additional complications as might be necessitated by the irrigation functions performed in the western states by the Bureau of Reclamation. We may legitimately brush aside the allegations of communism and dictatorship as unwarranted propaganda exaggerations devoid of genuine reality. We may similarly discount many of the “new heaven and new earth” asseverations of those social idealists most susceptible to verbal inebriation who have stood out as the most ardent and vocal advocates of the new mode of organizing Federal resource administration.

Few functions of the American Federal system seem less suited physically to state boundaries than the management of our water resources. The reason is readily apparent. Water flows according to drainage districts and not the riverbounded or rectilinear areas of the American states. Nevertheless, it takes more than topography to delineate the states or provinces of a nation; there are historical and constitutional factors to consider. Once provincial areas are established as states under a national constitution, and, such functions as water supply are assigned to these states, it is not only difficult but it may also be disruptive to withdraw such a function from them, even though physical facts and technological changes cry for this solution.