THOUGHTS TOWARDS REVISING THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION. THAT the Constitution of the United States is one of the most wonderful monuments of human wisdom, and therefore entitled to all the respectful reverence which forms the backbone of American loyalty, is evident from the perfection with which its provisions have operated, notwithstanding the changeful growth of the nation during the century of its existence. That its amend ments have been so few, that there is now no public sentiment in favor of more of them, is most extraordinary, in view of the fact that nearly all the old State Constitutions have been remodeled to adapt them to modern conditions, while the changes in the nation have certainly been far greater than those of any State. For, comparing 1787 with 1885, our population has grown from 3,000,000 to probably 55,000,000. The almost universal poverty of the people then, has given place to enormous accumulation of individual and corporate wealth now. The number of States has increased from thirteen to thirty-eight, besides nine territories. In lieu of the old difficult modes of communication on horseback, or by stage, or sloop, we have the railroad, the steamer, the telegraph. The seven-by-nine weeklies of Revolutionary days have grown into the mammoth dailies and semi-dailies of today. The log school-house has given place to the present elaborate systems of education, and Harvard, Princeton, and Yale are only the older among hundreds of American colleges. Is it to be supposed that if steam and electricity had not been subdued to human uses, this nation could have held together for even one hundred years? Would it not be an anomaly in history, that a Constitution, the first of its kind ever successfully adopted, designed to supply the wants of a poor and sparse population of only 3,000,000, should prove to be so perfect as to meet all the requirements of 55,000,000, under the conditions of proportionate expansion in all the relations of civilization? Will it not utterly fail, unless revised or greatly amended, to meet the needs of the 200,000,000 who will occupy the United States ere the close of the twentieth century? The following are some of the suggestions that have been mentioned as topics for discussion in this connection : I. Extend the powers of Congress, so as to authorize Federal legislation on a number of civil relations now exclusively legislated on by the several States. Such are marriage, divorce, inheritance, probate proceedings, modes and subjects of taxation, education, the tenure of real estate, and the collection of debts. Give to that body more clear and mandatory jurisdiction over interstate commerce and communication, and the exclusive regulation of banks, insurance companies, and all other corporations which transact business in more than one State or Territory. 2. Correspondingly curtail the jurisdic tion of the State Legislatures on the same subjects. 3. Increase the judicial power, so as to give to the Federal Courts jurisdiction over all claims against the United States, whether in law or equity, and allow the government to be sued, as well as to sue, in said courts. Give also to the judiciary, State and Federal, respective jurisdiction in all cases of contested elections, or cases involving the qualification of members of Legislature, instead of leaving each House to be the judge of such questions. entitle them to seats therein, with the right to initiate measures and take part in debates, even if no vote be given them. 6. Add to the qualifications of members of all legislative bodies, professional educacation in statecraft. 7. Change the source of the authority of Senators in all legislative bodies, so as to make the Senate the direct representative of capital, by conferring the power to vote for United States Senators only upon those individuals in each State (and for State Senators upon those in each Senatorial district) who shall have paid taxes during the previous year on at least $100,000 of their own property in such State or district. 8. Prohibit further immigration into the United States, except of such foreigners as shall have a certain degree of education, and some art or profession, or sufficient property to insure them a living. Limit the right of suffrage to persons born in the United States. 9. Abolish the present Indian system, and provide for Indians on precisely the same principles and conditions as are provided for all other races. Our first and second propositions involve a modification of the present dividing line between Federal and State jurisdiction. The reasons for the old division no longer exist. There are now no separate colonies, with diverse origins, peoples, religions, and traditions, so jealous of each other as to make it almost impossible to unite them into one nation. The inter-consolidation of the original thirteen States has now been silently going on for a century, while the twenty five new States and nine Territories never had any inherited peculiarities (other than those which were wiped out by the war) to prevent the citizen of any part of the nation feeling equally at home in every other part. In The old State prides, interests, and provincialisms have everywhere been melted into a common alloy in the alembic of universal inter-communication. Almost all citizens have relatives in more than one State. ter-marriages, inheritances, partnerships, migrations, and travel, are universal. Hundreds-perhaps thousands of corporations, employing thousands of millions of capital, are transacting business in banking, insurance, telegraphy, express, manufacturing, and transportation in more than one State, many of them in all the States and Territories. The census of 1880 shows that no less than $2,370,000,000 of property is owned in other States than those in which it is situated. The internal commerce of the country amounts to ten thousand millions annually, against a foreign trade of only one thousand five hundred millions. Passengers carried annually within the country are nearly six times the entire population. Yet, with all this consolidation and intercommunication among a growing people, who have hardly any interests that are strictly bounded by State lines, what an enormous mass of conflicting statutory law must be encountered on merely crossing the border ! All civil and penal legislation, and a great deal that is political (the few topics reserved to Congress excepted), must, under the present Constitution, be enacted by State or Territorial legislatures. Forty-seven statute-mills, manned mostly by green or dishonest hands, a majority of whom are elected because they are not fit, and superseded before they can become fit-at least by experience—are set to work every year, to grind out crude and undigested laws and regrind old ones, until the aggregate of such work would fill a public library; until a large part of the labors of the bench is not in administering the law, but in determining it; until no business man can pretend to keep posted in the changes that are continually occurring in the laws affecting his interests. We cannot, of course, here go into detail in the examination of facts in so large a field as is covered by this, or indeed by any of our own suggestions. For these we must refer to the knowledge of every newspaper reader. But we may safely ask: What is gained by all this unnecessary friction and complication in governmental machinery? Why should the divorced man, married to his second wife, be deemed respectable in one State and a bigamist in another? Why should the causes of divorce differ in different States? Why should there be such a universal chaos on the subject and methods of taxation? Why should the citizens of one State, who individually have the constitutional right to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States, find themselves at once enmeshed in the nets of hostile legislation, whenever they attempt to cross State lines in the character of stockholders in corporations? Who profits by all this fuss, except lawyers and politicians? Who suffer from it but the constantly increasing portion of the people whose residence, relatives, property, or business are in more than one State? Is it not time for the great nation to take a hint from the Roman Empire in the days of Justinian, or from France and her Codes Napoleon, and by some means not provided in our present constitution, devise and adopt a "Corpus Juris Civilis," which shall be uniform and permanent in all parts of our vast national domain? diction over claims against the Government from Congress to the Federal Courts, are self-evident to any reader of the Congressional Record. One great source of the corruption with which Congress has long been reeking, is the mass of private bills with which almost every member's pockets are stuffed at every session. In fact, many members are nominated and elected for the sole purpose of serving private interests at the expense of the nation. At the first session of the last Congress, more than ten thousand private bills were introduced, nearly all of them embodying claims upon the treasury. These, of course, could not-probably not a tenth of them-be justly dealt with on their merits in committee, much less in either House, while the merest attempt to properly investigate them could have been made only at the expense of the eight hundred public bills introduced at the same session. Of course, many members are pecuniarily interested in these private bills They go to Congress as the attorneys of claimants, from whom they receive large contingent commissions. Hence a powerful argument for trading votes; hence a corruption fund for party purposes; hence the "commercial principle" (heaven save the mark!), which is the oil which now lubricates nearly all our political machinery; hence the failure to reduce taxation, for money cannot be made out of an empty treasury; hence the infamies of the Committee Room, and one great source of the shameless venality which makes the very atmosphere of our national capital intolerable to a strictly honest man. Our third and fourth suggestions contemplate curtailing the powers of Congress in the departments of private and special legislation, by transferring to the courts exclusive jurisdiction over all claims against the Government, and by following English precedent in referring contested elections and cases touching the qualification of members to the Now the work of deciding the merits of courts. The last clause in the proposition claims against Government is really judicial needs no discussion. It has too long been and not legislative. It ought, therefore, to customary to seat or reject the doubtfully be performed by the courts where the claimelected or disqualified member, solely with ants reside. For, as it is a great hardship to reference to the effect of his vote upon the force an honest claimant to go to Washingparty in power, to leave room for any faith ton-perhaps with his witnesses -to prove in the decision of such cases on their legal his rights, probably to remain there for years merits by any legislative body or political before getting a hearing, so is it an advanparty. If justice be contemplated at all in tage to the fraudulent claimant to be able to such cases, they must be referred to disin- make an ex parte showing in the Star Chamterested tribunals. ber privacy of the Committee Room, far But the reasons for transferring the juris- away from parties and witnesses on the other side. The only honest objection to transferring the whole business to the courts is, the traditional idea that the Government cannot be sued, save by such special consent as is now sometimes given by Congress to proceed in the Court of Claims. Would it not be far better to abolish this legal fiction —itself a tradition of monarchy- and allow anybody to sue the Government, confining the function of Congress to the pay ment of judgments, than to preserve the phantasmic reverence for Government supposed to inhere in the present inhibition to sue, at the frightful cost to the nation of the present system? For it is a physical impossibility for the most able, industrious, and conscientious Congressman to give proper attention to his public duties, and yet devote the necessary time to this perpetual flood of private bills. And the predominance of these bills, like that of decayed fruit in a package, spreads infection throughout the entire mass, until it is popularly supposed that no meas ure whatever can be got through Congress that it is not tainted with personal or party corruption. Of course it is now, and always has been, in the power of Congress to remedy this great abuse of law. Why is it not done? Simply because it is too much to expect that Congressional politicians will enact any measure which would confine their emoluments to their salaries, let the public interests suffer as they may. The effect of the present state of things upon the transactions of public business is well shown in the following extract from the Washington correspondent of the San Francisco "Bulletin," of April 10th, 1884. "In two respects, the present year promises to be a political phenomenon. The oldest frequenters of the lobbies of Congress never saw legislation in so backward and deplorable a condition, and the pre diction is now freely made, that for a do-nothing Congress this will outstrip all its predecessors. There are about six hundred bills favorably acted on by committees now on the House calendars-seven or eight special orders, the Tariff Bill, and the Agricultural, Indian, Sundry, Civil, River and Harbor, and Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Appropriation Bills, all untouched. Under the most favorable circumstances, it will require until July 15th to pass the Tariff and Appropriation Bills. Fully three hundred and fifty bills which have passed the Senate are now lying on the Speaker's table in the House, awaiting reference to committees. These bills are probably the only ones that will be enacted. In the scramble of the last hours, they will be dragged out of their resting-places and rushed through. So far this session, the House has not once taken up the regular calendar, upon which there are over two hundred bills. Probably it will never be touched during the present Congress. With the four months ended day before yesterday, Congress passed fifteen bills and resolutions. At this rate, how long will it take to pass the six hundred now on the files? Something like ten years. Some of the old members say it is a blessing that Congress cannot pass the six hundred under ten years, for eighty per cent. of them are jobs. But they do not state how many really necessary bills die every year, and how much money is spent printing and reprinting the measures introduced. Some of these bills originated ten, twenty, thirt years ago. Congressmen have come and gone, but through defeat and death the bills have survived, and are biennially introduced, referred, reported, and left to perish on the files. gresses are slow, but this is generally acknowledged to be the slowest for years, if not the slowest that ever met in Washington. At the very greatest, six per cent. of the business before it cannot be transacted." All Con This account, with variations, is a true representation of the workings of our Congress during the past fifty years. It is the most cumbrous of all machines intended "how not to do it." Necessarily composed mainly of politicians successful enough to secure their election, but guiltless of statecraft, and with neither the desire nor qualification to serve the people in a business sense, while their only anxiety is to make their temporary power the means of fortune or subsequent office for themselves, Congress has never contained a majority of members who were fitted to render efficient service to the people. So its history has been a long narrative of inefficiency and often of national disgrace. It scolded for thirty years over slavery, to the serious neglect of public interests, but without settling the question of the negro otherwise than by the fugitive slave law and the repeal of the Missouri compromise. It received the money for the French Spoliation Claims some time in the twenties, but never passed any measure for its distribution until the last session, when doubtless all the origi until the average appellant must await the decision of preceding cases, accumulated five years deep. It has always failed in its treatment of the Indians, though never in filling the pocket of the "Indian ring." It has wholly failed to exercise its exclusive powers in regulating interstate commerce, notwithstanding the numerous and clear definitions of those powers by the Supreme Courtthough it has stretched its powers to create interstate monopolies. And so difficult has it become to procure any legislation of a public nature, in which there is neither a private fee nor political capital for the members, that the people are now content to suffer for a generation, as Californians have done over the Chinese question, from causes that a wise and patriotic Congress could remove in a few weeks or months of close attention to business. Meantime, the grinding out of private bills goes on! nal claimants are dead. It has neglected the reorganization of the Supreme Court, the Navy ever since the war of 1812, save during the four years of Civil War, until it has now become practically extinct, except as an annual charge to the Treasury. It has, during twenty years, so neglected the Merchant Marine that only a million and a quarter of tons of sailing vessels now fly the American flag in the foreign trade, being just one tenth of England's fleet, which ours nearly equalled in 1855. And when, after years of agitation, the Dingley law was passed by the last Congress, it was careful not to touch the vitals of the question. It has so neglected the fortifications of the country that we have not now a single gun anywhere capable of injuring a first-class iron clad, nor any foundry capable of making such a gun. Every one of our rich seaboard cities is therefore at the mercy of any power possessing iron-clad ships of war. It stole the Geneva award money from those claimants in whose name and for whose use it was obtained, and gave it to those whose claims had been expressly denied by the Commissioners, thereby doubling the future rates of war premiums on American vessels, as compared with those of other flags. It has always neglected the protection of American citizens abroad, so that, except in England, they have almost abandoned such foreign residence as is necessary to foreign commerce; and the commerce has become almost extinct. It has never shown the slightest disposition to check the flow of pauperism from Europe, though during two decades the institutions of the country, have been steadily undermined, especially in the cities, by the ignorant, prejudiced, thoughtless, and mercenary votes of foreigners. It has allowed the French to get possession of the Isthmus of Panama, from whence they will presently dominate our Pacific Coast commerce, unless we buy or drive them out -in either case at a cost of hundreds of millions. It has proved for years unable or unwilling to cope with financial questions, so as to settle definitely the relations of gold and silver coinage, and relieve the people from a weight of taxation nearly double the needs of the country. It has for years neglected In our own State we have found means to restrict the powers of the Legislature to the passage of general and public measures. The result has been the reduction of the biennial volume of statutes from one thousand octavo to three hundred and fifty duodecimo pages. One direction for Congressional reform is herein indicated. But other changes in the material, the methods, and powers of that now dangerous and treacherous branch of the Government are imperatively demanded, unless the whole framework of our Constitution is to be allowed to break down by the failure of its legislative department. This brings us to the fifth of our sugges tions, which expresses the idea so admirably brought out by Woodrow Wilson, of Johns Hopkins University, in his article on "Committee or Cabinet Government," in the OVERLAND MONTHLY of January, 1884. That article is worthy of the best writer in the Federalist. Mr. Wilson-after narrating, from personal observation, the faulty workings of the present Committee system, in its secrecy, its lack of personal or party responsibility, its customary indifference to the recommendations of the President, and its general subser |
