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Show -19- of the most exigent problems of conservation. Throughout the country cities are seeking to tap water for their inhabitants at distances remote from city limits. Los Angeles contemplates tapping the Colorado River over miles of desert; New York, fearing the exhaustion of the Catskill supply* is explor- ing the upper regions of the Delaware; Philadelphia aims toward a purer supply at remoter points on the Delaware River; the Jersey cities must draw on the same reservoir. Plainly here is a complexity which litigation can- not resolve, nor legislation by any one State through which a common stream happens to flow or which contains the common reservoir. The elaborate agree- ment just concluded by New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, now awaiting State action and Congressional sanction, represents the legal solution of the interests of three States dependent upon a common supply of water.76 Like the Colorado River Compact it formulates a policy for the apportion- ment and preservation of water and the adaptation of such policy to the fu- ture, secured through continuous study and supervision by a permanent joint administrative agency. The variety of powers proposed for this commission reveals the interrelation of the problems with which it is to deal and the scope of the proposed agreement. Priority of use, forest regulations, hydraulic constructions, sewage control, condemnation, riparian claims, all are inextricably bound up with the regulation of the water-supply. They are all aspects of a single problem and have to be dealt with as an entire- ty. (7) Public utility regulation discloses a steady contraction of con- trol by individual States and a corresponding absorption of authority by the Federal Government, More and more, in a growingly national system of transportation transactions which in their isolation constitute intrastate commerce have had their repercussion upon interstate commerce.77 Even here, however, the transfer of power from the States to the Federal Government; has been piece-meal, step by step. In its present far-reaching extension the localized interests of the individual states have been scrupulously written into law 78 and insisted upon by the Supreme Court.79 Apart from the railroads, however, there is still left a wide and vital sphere of interstate communications which project beyond State lines but are neverthe- less predominantly regional rather than national in their penetration. Con- gress has left a considerable part of this field unregulated just because it is essentially local or regional in its significance and because the 76 see Appx. A, IV, (2) infra. 77 This phenomenon may be traced more particularly in the legislation beginning with the Hepburn Act of June 29* 1906" (34 Stat. at L« 584) as applied in such cases as the Minnesota Rate Cases (1913) 230 U. S» 352* 33 Sup* Ct. 72U5 the Shreveport Case (I91I4) 232* U. S» 5h2, 3I4. Supt. Ct* 8335 the Wisconsin Rate Case (1922) 257 U« S* 563, i+2 Sup. Ct. 232; the New England Divisions Case (1923) 26l U. S. 18k, 1+3 Sup. Ct. 270; the Re- capture Clause decision, Dayton-Goose Creek Ry. v« United States (192I4.) 263 U. S. I+56, hh Sup» Ct* 169; the Los Angeles Terminal case, R. R* Comm- of California v. Southern Pac. Co. (1921*) 26I4 U. Ss 331 > U\ Sup. Ct. 376- 'Interstate Commerce Act, sec. 13 (2), 13(3) as amended by the Transportation Act of 1920 (I4I Stat. at U 1+56)* '"See Wisconsin Rate Case, supra note 77, at 590-591. |
