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Show -135- control over the most precious natural resriTce within the sovereign juris- diction of each of the States of the Arid Region, emanating though they may from high minded motives, have naturally awakened those entrusted with the administration of our State Governments to the dangers confronting the establishment of any such un-American and un-Constitutional policy and to apprehension and grave concern respecting any doctrine of national control whereby State sovereignty would cease and the streams would be burdened down with interstate servitudes against the will and beyond the control of the Constitutions and laws of the sarvient States; and whereby all future advancement; essential to the welfare and self-preservation of each of the States would ultimately pass from the jurisdiction of the States and the exercise of their sovereign will as expressed in their Constitutions and laws, and into the keeping of those men who may happen to-be in successive temporary control of bureaus at Washington and who will be answerable in the exercise of discretionary powers, not to the States but to the ever changing and oftimes illadvised and overworked heads of administrative departments of the Government and who., in turn, are ever subject to human prejudices, preconceived opinions, caprice, personal ambitions, politioal motives and, above all, to the advice of prejudiced or partially informed but assuming theorists who are ever present and covertly seeking to shape national and State affairs to fit their favorite formulas. The Western States naturally look with grave concern and grow- ing apprehension upon doctrines or policies "rhich are certain to ultimately undermine or destroy their integrity and usurp or deprive them of the most essential attributes of sovereignty, A'dmitted as they are, in all respects upon an equality with other States of the Union, they demand the equal privi- lege of administering thoir own affairs and preserving and providing for their people and the development of their territories as their future neces- sities may require, free from external control, unburdened with those foreign servitudes upon their greatest natural resource (their streams) which would be immune from the exercise of their sovereignty, and unhampered with clouds upon the integrity of the investments of their citizens by assertions of any such foreign servitudes, emanating from those high in the administra- tion of the affairs of our National Government. These States view with grave concern the growing disposition of interference with their internal affairs by men immune to the will of the States and insist upon their con- stitutional right of a government by law and not by men, and have given full expression to their just complaint in the resolution adopted by that association of the officials of the State, known as the "League of the Southwest", in 1919 at Salt Lake City and in 1920 at Denver, pursuan-t to which resolutions the present interstate compact legislation was enacted. (See copy resolutions-Hearing Judiciary Corn, House of Rep, 67 Cong. 1st Sess, on H, R. 6821 June U, 1921-Serial 6 and appendix hereto.) But the factors mentioned have only served to awaken the Westexn States to a realization of their duties as we.ll as of their powers as States of the Federal Union. The galling yoke of bureaucratic oppression and subtle assertion and indirect application of doctrines of National control and interference with the internal affairs and development of the States, have awakened their broad-minded officials to the first duty of |
