ECENTRALIZATION of governmental activity in its simplest sense means mere geographical dispersion.' Reference even here may be to either of two things-dispersion of governmental total activity or dispersion of the personnel and offices of a given division within the larger organism. The former has been in the forefront of recent discussion, with the Grazing Service moved to Salt Lake City, the Home Owners' Loan Corporation to New York, and proposals afoot in our defense-jammed capitol for legislative extension of this policy.2 Basically there is nothing new in all this. While some of the founding fathers thought of the federal city as a gigantic leech wherein the federal offices and officers would be absorbed, in practise the executive and judicial branches were from the beginning and from necessity strewn throughout the states. Congress alone was confined to Washington, and even it only in its formal legislative capacity. This aspect of decentralization holds little specific interest for our present task of investigating the extent to which this federal union still remains federal. This is not to deny that as a problem of public administration physical dispersion poses interesting questions, such as the allocation of particular activities to appropriate localities, the effective utilization of existing available space to prevent such repetitions of the Washington housing situation as exists in Baltimore, and so on; but these are matters more proper for consideration elsewhere. Particular agencies, moreover, have been subject to the same geographical dispersion. The collectors of the customs, the postoffices, and the army personnel have been scattered for longer than there has been a union. We may suspect that there is a greater proportion of the federal personnel now located in Washington than was stationed in New York in 1790; I know of no statistics to prove this, however, and the supposition may well be erroneous.3