Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1891, by T. & J. W. JOHNSON & CO., In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. COLLINS PRINTING HOUSE, PREFACE. THE accompanying work is an attempt to present in a concrete form the entire system of Federal and State legislation, as practised under a written Constitution in the United States. Its object is to expound those administrative powers which, in our dual form of representative government, are sovereign within their several spheres of action. In tracing them along their respective borderlines to points where they either concur in operation, or conflict in jurisdiction, it has been necessary to explore the channels of our constitutional jurisprudence in their affiliated relations with statutory law. A written Constitution is a political grammar to whose rules administrative laws must conform, in order to give them judicial validity. Accordingly, the author's aim has been to exhibit the foundations of our political system; to trace its development into a Federal government of balanced powers, and to search out the reasons which animate their exercise, as historically evolved and judicially interpreted. Under a Under a political system framed as is ours, the most important legal forces are unquestionably those sovereign powers of Federal and State legislation which, in their governmental relations, bear to each other certain quasi-international aspects. The government of forty-four independent States, dwelling in harmonious relations under a supervisory Federal sovereignty, would seem, therefore, to justify the treatment of Legislation as a department of jurisprudence meriting more textual consideration than it has yet received. An hundred years of constitutional government and judicial interpretation of its limits has divested the subject of all theoretical aspects. It has passed from the sphere of experiment to that of an enduring fact, and will continue to be a living, practical problem to all students of democratic institutions. Acting upon this conviction, the present treatise has been prepared to meet the wants of those who, desiring to practise or interpret the canons of representative government in the United States, may seek to master the secrets of its architecture through a study of the labors of its founders, and to trace its genesis and development to a providential origin in the Spartan Commonwealths of our colonial period. NEW YORK, May, 1891. JOHN ORDRONAUX. |