YOU'RE SMALLER THAN I AM

In the carefully separated trilogy of American government, built in three concentric spheres, there has generally been little friction between the two inner bodies, local and state control, while the latter and the federal administration have rubbed each other the wrong way violently enough to form a strong issue in campaigns a century apart. Indifference, and a personal touch, have helped to satisfy the two smaller divisions in their relations; but here in Massachusetts, the section in which originated the ideal of local self-government, and its expression in the town-meeting, the small towns, through their associated selectmen, have spoken vigorously against the encroachments of the Commonwealth on their local authority.

This is the usual unpleasant spectacle of the persecuted Freshman hazing the next class as soon as he is a Sophomore. For fourteen decades the quarrel of state and national governments has dragged through courts and congresses and war. Recent years have seen the states quietly increasing their own jurisdiction, even as the federal administration has stepped, more or less successfully, into their affairs; the establishment of state police, the summoning of militia in last spring's strike, the bill pending now before the General Court limiting the small town's power of appointing local officials, are indications of this trend.

The once proud democracy of the Commonwealth is facing a very real danger: no tenuous theory of possible powers is involved, but the actual undermining of the New England tradition of individual and local liberty. The Association of Selectmen has marked the need of resistance; their protest must remain impotent until the voters overcome post-campaign lethargy and give sinews to such opposition.