veneration and respect for government expressed by my friend from Illinois, Mr. Bonney. I believe the government has no right to exercise any function, save that which the people have specially delegated to it. And I believe that the more civilization, the less government and the less restraint is needful. Let the national government confine itself to its own function; let us have a strict construction of the constitution: that no power should be exercised save those which are expressly delegated, all others being reserved to the people and the states respectively; not that elastic construction which enabled the Supreme Court of the United States to give sanction to that most infamous of all propositions, that a great nation can repudiate its debts; an infamy that would not be tolerated in Turkey, or in South America prevail. Now, gentlemen, herein consists the remedy: let us have the constitution amended, so that items of an appropriation bill can be vetoed; let the rules of your legislation be so revised that care and skill can be given to every public Herein you have a remedy that is American, and not Anglican. Let us lean on the excellency and glory of the only government which is based upon the law of equal freedom. measure. The President: I am reminded that the rule of this discussion is laid down in our By-Laws, and limits speakers to ten minutes each, unless by special consent. The discussion may now proceed. Henry C. Semple, of Alabama: I should feel great diffidence in discussing this question, except for the fact that Judge Poland, last night, desired me to relate an instance of this "slip-shod" legislation in my own state. I shall take advantage of that invitation to address you, and will close what I have to say by relating that case. I cannot agree entirely with my brother from Illinois, or my brother from New York. As to the former, one of his objections to the views presented by Mr. Sterne was that he did not go to the very foundation of our difficulties; and one of the chief troubles, in his opinion, was the constitution of two houses in our legislatures, when we have no such thing as a hereditary class. I believe that our forefathers builded wiser than they knew when they followed the precedent of two houses. They perhaps foresaw this immense mass of statute legislation, and they intended that system, not as a model after the British House of Lords, but as a means of obstruction to hasty legislation; and I insist that it would be better if there was no difference whatever between the Senate and the House of Representatives; that there should be two, even if we divided the House of Assembly into two branches; it would be far better that a bill would have to go through two mills before becoming a law. C. C. Bonney, of Illinois: I agree to that. Henry C. Semple, of Alabama: I differ somewhat from my friend from New York. I am not ashamed to adopt what is good in all foreign lands. We lawyers, above all others, know that those things which we inherit are most valuable. I think it was Paul who said that he was born a Roman citizen, and he valued that great inheritance more highly because it was an inheritance; others had acquired it at a great price, but he was born a Roman citizen. So we lawyers value those privileges and those liberties which we inherited from good old England; and when we come to count that which we value most, you will find that we have inherited most of it. Very little of our system of jurisprudence has been manufactured. We inherited it, and we have simply improved upon it. So I say that in this invention-for it was a recent invention in England, that grew out of the extension of the popular system of a return to the manner of our old ancestors who lived in the forests of Germany-it is only since they became liberal, since the franchise has been extended, twenty times as far as it was in the day of Burke, that the system of watchfulness of experienced men over parliamentary legislation has been adopted in Great Britain. Our friend seems to think that these men are the advocates of those who introduce these measures for their own benefit. That is not so. The men who introduce the measures are required to pay a fee. The parliamentary agents are the counsel to parliament; they watch all these measures; they see that there is no slip-shod legislation. The duties performed by these men have been found to be most excellent auxiliaries to good government. So far from being undemocratic, it has sprung up with the advance of democratic ideas, and has demonstrated its own usefulness. my state, the legislature is in session sixty days. During the last session, some six or seven hundred bills were passed, of which the most important was the Revenue bill, which was rendered necessary by the settlement of the state debt. They had required the creditors to take bonds, with interest payable at three to five per cent., increasing from year to year, and the necessity of providing an increased fund to pay the increased interest made it necessary to remodel the Revenue bill. Instead of devoting sufficient time to this important bill, it was put off until the very last day of the session, and was signed by the governor at twelve o'clock at night, after only a few hours' time in which he could look it over. When the bill was first introduced, the Senate and House differed. The bill was amended. The House refused to assent to the amendment. Conference Now, in want. committees were appointed. They discussed it, and finally agreed upon it. In the final enrolment of the bill, the clerk left out the words "or solvent credits." The Senate had insisted upon those words, which the House did not The bill was approved by the governor without noticing the omission. I was applied to by a certain corporation to know whether they were obliged to pay the new tax, and discovered that, after the legislature had adjourned, and after the act had been printed, a sort of caucus had been held in the Supreme Court library by certain gentlemen -the chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means in the House, the same from the Senate; the chairman of the Finance Committee in the Senate, the same from the House; and the chairmen of the Senate and House Judiciary Committees had got together and decided that they would put those three words back in the bill. They actually took the bills from the archives of the state, and (I believe, with the consent of the governor, at least with his knowledge), erased three lines in the bill, and then rewrote them, together with the words "or solvent credits." This proceeding came to my knowledge. I knew, of course, that the bill was null and void, under those circumstances, and the Supreme Court so declared it to be. Here, you see, is a history of slipshod legislation occurring within the last eighteen months, which furnishes one of the strongest arguments for the application of the rules which our friend, Mr. Sterne, suggests. John F. Dillon, of New York: Did your Supreme Court look beyond the engrossed bill? Henry C. Semple: Yes, sir. R. Wayne Parker, of New Jersey: I wish to say how much I doubt the efficacy of constitu tions to control legislatures; how much I doubt also as to the reference of law-making to a committee, much as I sympathize with the wish of the gentleman to whom we listened with so much pleasure last night, that we should have some sort of a committee who should supervise legislation. We have now a mode of proceeding in every legis lature under which any ten honest men can call before the legislature and public every defect in every bill. We have three readings that can be insisted upon. We have two houses, and a governor whose duty it is to look over the bills, and why in that court of parliament that we have, are not the bills considered? Simply because the legislature does not want to consider them, and because every member has a bill that he would like to shove through. We have in my own state, provisions that all private acts shall be advertised before the session. The constitutional provision exists, but the legislature changes the private act into a seemingly public law, and passes it as such. The only thing that can be relied upon to restrain any deliberative body is a few honest, upright, obstinate men, who are willing to stand up and say that a bill shall not be hurried through, men who are ready to be called "cranks" and obstructionists, and who are ready to do anything to secure deliberation. We are asked to go a step further, and take that deliberation from the legislature and put it in the hands of a commission. I believe in commissions for advice and for deliberation and determination, not for legislation. If legislators can shove the responsibility of general laws off their own shoulders, they do it. We all know that the more you put in the hands of a commission, the less debate you have, and the more power lobbyists have in framing and passing what laws they please. Permanent commissions, which are continued through the sessions of several legislatures, as a rule, become the worst |