(Following are excerpts from the address of Mississippi Gov. Rees R. Barnett to the Harvard Law School forum Feb. 4. In the early part of his speech, Barnett dealt with the attractions of his state and recent signs of its economic progress, concluding that "all areas of this nation are aware of the peace, harmony, and opportunities, that exist in Mississippi.")

It is a pleasure to be with you tonight and I would like to tell you a little about Mississippi, our opportunities, our economic development, and our progress.

I hope all of you will visit our great state. I would like for you to see our beautiful new football stadium seating 46,000; our coliseum which will seat 10,000; I wish you could see the 35,000 acres of water known as the Great Pearl River reservoir, which will be completed within the next year and see the beautiful, scenic, historic Gulf Coast where we have the longest man-made beach in the world--A 23 mile sand beach....

Mississippi is the greatest states' rights state in the nation. Mississippians as far back a 1944, took a firm stand against the socialletis platforms that were then shaping up. For 20 years, we have steed upon the sound foundation of constitutional government and states' rights. In the last Presidential election, our people voted unpledged and we gave our electoral votes to that great conservative, Sen. Harry Byrd of Virginia....

We have heard much here of late with reference to the rights of states being sacrificed and ruthlessly destroyed by an all-consuming federal government. The federal government is constantly making a whipping boy out of the states and is assuming to exercise powers it does not have under the Constitution and that, by the Constitution, were expressly reserved in the states and the people thereof by the Tenth Amendment.

Today, more than at any times in this century, men and women, north and south, east and west, are rallying to the defense of fundamental principles.... These Americans hold, with me, that the preservation or maintenance of state sovereignty is indispensable to the preservation of human rights. We are convinced that once the right of a state to exercise exclusive jurisdiction over a local problem is lost, human rights, liberty, and freedom will perish....

The people of the states are extremely conscious of this usurpation of the Constitutional rights of the states, but much needs to be done to awaken the states to their perilous condition. There is a crying need for the states to organize into a compact, expressing the feeling of the states with reference to these usurpations, the consequent destruction of our Constitutional form of government, and presenting a common front against such unconstitutional encreachment by the federal government....

Surely, the states are conscious of their peril and of the peril to their people. We must no longer remain idle or complacent. The clarion must be sounded for the states to come to their own defense and obtain a restoration of Constitutional government.

States rights and Constitutional government are inseparable. The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States very clearly states the position of the states as related to the federal government, and here is what it says:

"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution nor prohibited by it to the states are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people."

Any high school student can understand what those 28 words mean. It is indeed regrettable that many decrees, orders, and edicts have been issued wholly contrary to the meaning of the Tenth Amendment.

The courts adhered to the meaning and fundamental principles of the Tenth Amendment for nearly 100 years, and further held that state soverignty could not be bartered away or surrendered by legislative action. Then suddenly, they reversed [earlier] decisions,...and began to enter orders, decrees, and edicts based on sociological ideas as advanced and advocated by Gunnar Myrdal and others, thereby whittling away, year by year, the rights that are reserved to the states by the Tenth Amendment. These decisions are in conformity with the wishes of the left-wing and Communist front organizations.

We must not fall into the trap of worldwide Communism. The basic tactics of worldwide Communism is to divide and to conquer. It is to set free nation against free nation, and within the nation, to set brother against brother. Its objective in the United States is to promote tension, turmoil, strife, and to bring about misunderstanding and mistrust.

States rights and local self-government are older than the Constitution. They existed before the Union was formed and were recognized and protected by Thomas Jefferson and other Founding Fathers when they wrote the Constitution itself.

The preservation of the prerogatives of people of a sovereign state, their right to deal exclusively with domestic problems and the absolute and unqualified denial of a totalitarian state in the United States--these principles are just as vital as, and more intimately affect, the welfare of every man, woman, and child in America than even such important questions as foreign policy and all other serious questions which we face today, important as those issues are. May God forbid that your respective states and mine, our counties, our cities, our farms, and our businesses shall ever be subject to Washington bureaucratic police rule.