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saying that the utility of the House was greatly impaired if it was compelled to sit during too many months. "I do not believe," Mr. Balfour declared, "the Departments can do their business if the House is going to sit ten months in the year. I do not believe the Ministers can give the necessary time for thinking out great schemes of social reform, whatever they are, and I do not believe the members can give that [desirable?] interest or zest in debates which are continued for an undue period." Lord George Hamilton, publishing his "Parliamentary Reminiscences and Reflections" two years later, concluded the last chapter with a list of the indispensable reforms in his judgment "necessary for the preservation and continuance of our national life and of our Empire." At the very head he placed: "First, we must reform the existing procedure of the House of Commons and curtail the duration of the session. At present men of character and ability and accustomed to a busy life decline to waste ten months of the calendar year in an atmosphere of self-advertising talk and lobby intrigue."

Before the War the French Assembly was going beyond both Parliament and Congress in amount of work, averaging to sit two hundred days.

There are those who think that the enormous increase in the scope of our Federal activities will prevent Congress from ever returning to the average of sittings customary before the War. They say it will have to recognize that in order to come nearer doing its work properly, it must sit continuously, except for reasonable and regular vacations. This will not be a novelty. During the Revolutionary War it was both customary and necessary for Congress to sit all the time, and after the war until the formation of the Union the practice continued, except for short intervals when the government was left in the hands of committees of the States. To be sure, reasons then prevailed that do not now exist. Congress was the executive as well as the legislative. From motives of economy the States generally kept their representation down to the minimum, and the indifference about attending, together with the provision that nine States must approve action, made delay constant and the work could not be finished promptly. At times the representation was so scanty that one eighth of the members present could block the most important measures. Of course the situation is now quite otherwise, but it may be worth remembering that

continuous session of our chief lawmaking body would not be unprecedented.

It would, however, in some respects be unfortunate. Congressmen ought to have personal touch with their constituencies as often as practicable, both to inform and to be informed. Furthermore, the conscientious member finds that the work at Washington makes no small drain upon his vitality. Time and opportunity for recreation are limited. Not a few of the members find it necessary to live in cramped quarters devoid of accustomed home comforts. The summer season is trying. Most of the men are no longer young, and to carry the load of responsibility through nearly all the year over-taxes their strength. Their work would be the better and their lives the longer if their noses were not kept on the grindstone more than half the year.

For the State Legislatures the conditions are different. With the range of their duties, the variety of their problems, the volume of their work, far more extensive than in the case of Congress, is it wholly preposterous that they should sit continuously? We are quite accustomed to see the legislative branches of our city governments sit at regular intervals through the year. Only accidental considerations kept our State legislative bodies from developing the same practice. In colonial times and indeed up to the development of our railroad systems, the slowness of travel made any but periodical gatherings out of the question. The obstacle has disappeared in our more populous States. If it were thought desirable, it would be perfectly feasible now in many of the States to have Legislatures meet with the regularity and frequency of a City Council. Augustus decreed that the Roman Senate should assemble twice every month for the dispatch of business, and required that at least four hundred members should be present at every sitting. In the sultry and pestilential months of September and October he released them from this fatiguing service, except only a smaller number chosen by lot, who were constrained still to meet on the stated days. Much the same system was urged on the New York Constitutional Convention of 1915 by Merton E. Lewis, First Deputy Attorney General. He wanted the Legislature to meet in the first week of every month in the year except July and August. He argued that more men would 1 Charles Merivale, History of the Romans under the Empire, ш, 394.

find it possible to give up a definite week in every month than can be found to give time for a continuous service of four or five or more months, broken only by hasty and unsatisfactory visits home at week-ends. There would be no closing days of the session with its congestion, as the unfinished business of one month would go over to the next month. There would be no thirty-day period during which the Governor would have to pass upon from five hundred to a thousand bills. There would be greater deliberation if provision were made that no bill could be acted upon in the month of its introduction except in an emergency pointed out by message from the Governor. That would give the members three weeks to consider the calendar of the next month.

Dudley S. A. Cosby, writing in the "Westminster Review" for October, 1905, of the situation in England, declared it might be said without exaggeration that it was an absolute impossibility for any Government to carry out a quarter of the legislation necessary, in the time at the disposal of the House. He urged sessions throughout the year, with Saturdays to Mondays free, and suitably distributed holidays.

PRESSURE IN THE CLOSING DAYS

To get rid of the congestion in the closing days of the session would be a most important gain. To the pernicious effect of that congestion, perhaps more than to any other one cause, is due the inferior quality of our legislation. After reading the story of what takes place as our Legislatures draw to an end, the marvel is that the statutory product is not far worse. The tale was told by four Governors at the Conference of 1913. Governor Hodges described the Kansas session of that year. "In the closing days, as in all Legislatures," he said, "there was lawmaking in hot haste, bills were rushed through under omnibus roll-calls, and the result was a lot of more or less crude and ill-digested laws, some of which are puzzles for even learned jurists to interpret with anything like satisfaction to themselves or to the public." He went on to say that notwithstanding the fact that his executive clerk and the Attorney General did their best to scrutinize all bills, two chapters duplicated two others; one chapter of old law was repealed three times; a new chapter was immediately amended by the succeeding chapter; an old

chapter repealed by a new one was amended and repealed by another. A bill came to him containing a negative reversing its purpose. Two bills were exact duplicates. A number of bills passed both Houses without any enacting clauses-absolutely necessary to their validity as laws. All told he had to return fifteen bills for correction, and in the Sessions Laws will be found a large number of resolutions authorizing corrections in acts.

Governor Stewart of Montana, where sessions are limited to sixty days, said the worst thing they had to contend with in his State was "the tendency of the two Houses to dilly-dally along during the early part of the session." On the last day of the preceding session 125 bills came to him, and he had something like 175 or 200 when the Legislature adjourned.

Ex-Governor Gilchrist of Florida, spoke to like effect: "I dare say it has been the experience of every gentleman on the floor who has served in a Legislature where the Legislature sat for sixty days, that for the first forty days of the session there is very little work done. They pass about thirty or forty per cent of the bills, and they dump them all in during the last ten or twelve days of the session. In Florida, two or three hundred bills go to the Governor during the last four days of a sixtyday session." 1

That the evil is not confined to States with limited sessions, was shown by the testimony of Governor Dunne of Illinois. "Three fourths of all the legislation that was passed at this last session by the Illinois Legislature," he said, "was passed within the last ten days of the Legislature, and I will state to you gentlemen, upon my word, that when the bills were engrossed and handed to the Governor, after they had been submitted to the Attorney General to pass upon their constitutionality, I was compelled to pass upon nearly two hundred bills of vital importance to the State of Illinois, within five days." 2 Since then conditions have become worse yet. Of the 361 bills passing both Houses in 1921, final passage was given to 315 in the last seventy-two hours.

In the first eight weeks of the eleven through which the New Jersey Legislature of 1923 sat, 36 bills were presented to the Governor; in the next three, 217. An examination of the work of the General Assembly of Iowa shows it has been customary

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in that State to pass in the last ten days of the session more than two thirds of all the bills enacted. Indiana is even more blameworthy, if the record of the session of 1917 was not exceptional. According to John A. Lapp1 one hundred and fifty laws were dumped on the desk of the Governor in the last two days, less than fifty having been previously sent to him. Says Mr. Lapp: "The last night of the session members could be found enrolling their own bills in any part of the capitol in order to get them signed by the presiding officer before adjournment. What a splendid chance to slip jokers into bills! What a splendid opportunity for the clever gentlemen who knew exactly what they wanted! In this confusion many good laws came through in such shape as to render them invalid." Mr. Lapp's judgment is that it is utterly impossible to do the work in sixty-one days.

A report drawn by Simon Sterne, for the special committee of the New York Board of Trade and Transportation on Constitutional Amendments, dated May 31, 1894, castigated deservedly what was going on in New York. "Toward the end of the session bills then introduced are frequently not printed; they are acted upon by committees, if at all, under great pressure to finish their work before the end of the session. They are frequently not placed in the hands of any standing committee, but are read from the clerk's desk 'by title,' and at once put upon their passage, and when the vote is taken it is generally taken in ignorance of the scope and purport of the measure. In these last days of the session votes are generally bargained away for counter votes from fellow-members by what is known as log-rolling. We can make clear to our minds the monstrous character of this proceeding if we would suppose a court of justice, on finding its calendar encumbered with causes which cannot be tried before the summer vacation, dispensing with the taking of the testimony of witnesses and argument of counsel, and deciding such cases upon the pleadings alone. The miscarriage and travesty of justice which would result from such a course partakes of the same nature, if we would but see it, of the mischief which is annually enacted at Albany, and at most, if not at all, other capitals of the country, in the corrupt and slipshod method of grinding out laws toward the end of a legislative session.”

1 Quoted by Ogg and Ray, Int. to Am. Govt., 599.

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